"People don't recognize what an

incredible piece of equipment and engineering the space shuttle was," says Mae Jemison, an astronaut who flew on Endeavour in 1992. "The magic left after the Challenger disaster. We started thinking it's dangerous and stopped thinking we could do difficult things." Atlantis is scheduled to perform the final mission, resupplying the International Space Station (ISS). NASA will then buy seats on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to get astronauts into orbit; U.S. private companies have been tapped to deliver cargo to the ISS.

Fleet:

5 Space Planes—Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour

First Delivered:

March 1979, Columbia

Expected Launches:

500

Actual Launches:

135

Total Flight Time (as of January 2011):

1289 days, 36 minutes, 29 seconds

Shuttles Lost:

2 (Challenger, 1986; Columbia, 2003)

Total Passengers/Crew:

836

Rollbacks from Launchpad:

19

Reason for Delay:

Mechanical: 10

Weather: 5

Payload: 2

Bird Damage: 1

Hail Damage: 1

Fatalities:

14

Failure Rate:

1 in every 67.5 missions

Rate of Liquid Fuel Consumption During Takeoff:

45,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen per minute

17,000 gallons of liquid oxygen per minute

Rate of Solid Fuel Consumption During Takeoff:

660,000 pounds per minute

Speed in Orbit:

17,500 mph

G-Force at Launch:

3 G's

Time to Orbit:

8.5 minutes

Landing Speed at Touchdown:

220 MPH

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