Space Shuttle History

5 January 1972	President Richard Nixon orders the development of a reusable space shuttle that can take off like a rocket, orbit the Earth and land like an airplane. Up until this point, spacecrafts could only be used once.
12 April 1981	The first shuttle, Columbia, is launched into space. The flight lasts slightly more than two days, and its main purpose is to test the spacecraft.
18 June 1983	Sally Ride, travelling on Challenger, becomes the first American woman in space.
30 August 1983	Guion Bluford, aboard Challenger, becomes the first African American in space.
7 February 1984	Bruce McCandless becomes the first person to walk in space without being fastened to a spacecraft. He flies 320 feet away from the orbiter Challenger.
28 January 1986	Challenger, with teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard, explodes 73 seconds after lift-off. Investigators determine that the shuttle was torn apart because of a problem that caused a fuel tank to catch fire.
29 September 1988	Space shuttle Discovery returns to space after the entire shuttle fleet was grounded for nearly three years.
18 October 1989	Shuttle Atlantis brings the spacecraft Magellan into orbit. Magellan, which does not have a crew on board, begins its 15-month journey to explore Venus and provides images to help eventually create the most detailed map of Venus ever made.
26 April 1990	Discovery releases the Hubble space telescope. Scientists determine that there is a problem with the telescope's mirror, and in a later flight in December 1993, astronauts perform a complicated series of space walks to fix the telescope. The repairs allow the telescope to produce stunning images.
7 May 1992	Shuttle Endeavour, built to replace Challenger, takes its first flight.
29 June 1995	Atlantis is the first shuttle to dock with Russian space station Mir. This is especially important because it showed coordination between mission control teams in Houston and in Moscow, Russia. (In the 1960s, the U.S. and Russia were involved in what is referred to as the Space Race, a competition to see which country could make more advancements in space.)
29 October 1998	Senator John Glenn, who in 1962 became the first American to orbit Earth, returns to space aboard Discovery at the age of 77.
4 December 1998	The crew of Endeavor begins assembly of the International Space Station.