NASA's first Space Shuttle commander was on the Moon when he heard the news, in April 1972, that the USA's first reusable spacecraft had been green-lighted for development. “The country needs that Shuttle mighty bad,” astronaut John Young remarked. “You'll see.” He was right.
After years of sending people into space in oneuse-only capsules atop one-use-only boosters, programmes like Apollo were unsustainable. War in Vietnam and civil unrest at home convinced many in the US that a cheaper way of transporting people into space was needed. The Space Shuttle was born.
Delta-winged, of similar size to a DC-3 airliner, the Space Shuttle boasted a two-tiered cockpit and an 18.3-metre-long (60ft) payload bay used to launch and recover satellites, and to hold Europe's purposebuilt Spacelab module for wide-ranging
