The space shuttle was truly groundbreaking. When the design was first unveiled in the 1970s, people were used to the idea of sending people into orbit or even to the moon in relatively tiny space capsules, but the enormous winged shuttles, with their stark, black-and-white color scheme and covering of novel thermal protection system tiles, captured the world’s imagination.
Still, for all its glamour, the space shuttle posed tremendous engineering problems for its designers and its operators. Because the shuttle program deviated from the existing blueprint for putting humans into space,
