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Thirty Years of NASA Space Shuttle Missions

The shuttle Columbia lifts off on the first space shuttle mission ever, STS-1, on April 12, 1981.

NASA's space shuttle fleet is hanging up its wings after 30 years. The first shuttle flight, STS-1, launched on April 12, 1981.

The current and former astronauts posed for a historic set of photographs.
Boeing is leasing an old shuttle processing hangar at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
Every Halloween, I carve one or two pumpkins with the mission emblem of either an upcoming mission or one that is currently in orbit.
SpaceX's Dragon capsule has notched another milestone.
NASA's is opening its Vehicle Assembly Building for public tours at the Kennedy Space Center.
Boeing is putting its CST-100 spaceship through its paces.
The deal could be worth up to $4.5 million.
It's time to accept the fact that the shuttles won't fly again, experts say.
Houston and New York City are among those with tweaked plans to display NASA space shuttles.
After 5 month aboard the International Space Station, the NASA astronaut returned to Earth aboard a Soyuz TMA-21 on September 16. SPACE.com's Clara Moskowitz caches up with him in this exclusive interview.
Captain Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, upset with the United States' current inability to ferry astronauts to Low Earth Orbit, wants the STS program to be reinstated until a suitable replacement is put in place.
A rundown of some of the biggest spacecraft to smash into Earth beyond their operators' control.
The prototype shuttle Enterprise was revealed to the public on Sept. 17, 1976.
A look at some of the top milestones from the first 50 years of human spaceflight, from Gagarin's historic flight to the birth of space tourism.
NASA had 150 astronauts in 1999. Now it has 61.
A long Russian rocket crash inquiry may force the six-man space station crew to leave the outpost empty.
The International Space Station crew wants to know if they'll stay in space longer because of the crash.