Fun Space Shuttle Facts

(as collected from various sources around the interweb…)

A total of five space shuttles have flown 135 missions from 1981 through 2011.

Cumulatively, these space craft spent 1,330 days (over 3.5 years) in flight, with the longest flight being almost 18 days.

Each space shuttle launch requires about 150,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and almost 400,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen, on top of the solid rocket boosters each containing 1.1 million pounds of propellent, to get into orbit.

The shuttle accelerates from 0 to 17,000 mph over a period of 8.5 minutes during lift off.

A total of 356 astronauts have flown on the space shuttle during its 30-year program. Roughly 32,000 people had a hand in the shuttle at one point or another.

Just some of the inventions that NASA had a hand in with the space program – cordless tools, smoke detectors, running shoe insoles, velcro, memory foam, scratch-resistant eye-glasses, and improvements to pacemakers.

The space shuttle actually breaks the sound barrier twice during re-entry – once at the nose of the orbiter and a second a moment later at the tail of the craft.

The five shuttles have travelled in total an excess of 542 million miles, or just over the distance from the sun to Jupiter.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour cost $1.7 billion to build. The entire shuttle program in its 30-year duration cost $470 billion. The average cost per mission was about $450 million.

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