Perhaps more than any other shuttle, Discovery consistently delivered.- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
It made its debut in 1984 following shuttles Columbia and Challenger, dispatched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, flew the first shuttle rendezvous to Russia's Mir space station and carried the first female shuttle pilot in 1995, and gave another ride into space to John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, in 1998.
It got NASA flying again, in 1988 and 2005, following the Challenger and Columbia disasters. And it flew 13 times to the space station, more than any other craft. On its last trip, it delivered a new storage compartment packed with supplies and a humanoid robot.
Read Ken Kremer's blog post for the Planetary Society.
Altogether, Discovery spent a full year (365 days) in space during the 39 missions, orbited Earth 5,830 times, and traveled 148,221,675 miles during a career spanning 27 years.
