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r/spaceshuttle

Image 1 — Made a piñata for my nephew’s space themed party and now he wants to keep it
Image 2 — Made a piñata for my nephew’s space themed party and now he wants to keep it
Image 3 — Made a piñata for my nephew’s space themed party and now he wants to keep it
Image 4 — Made a piñata for my nephew’s space themed party and now he wants to keep it
Image 5 — Made a piñata for my nephew’s space themed party and now he wants to keep it
▲ 145 r/spaceshuttle

Made a piñata for my nephew’s space themed party and now he wants to keep it

Reposted since I forgot to include the construction photos

u/Szechuansauce95 — 4 days ago
▲ 108 r/spaceshuttle

A soccer ball, recovered from the remains of the orbiter Challenger, on the ISS, decades later.

u/SweetStar13 — 4 days ago
▲ 503 r/spaceshuttle

Buran prototype OK-GLI

I went to Speyer Technik Museum in Germany to attend a lecture from former NASA astronaut Mark Lee, and also got to see this beast! It’s the prototype used for the atmospheric test flights for the Buran program, it flew 25 times before being retired.

u/Destyre — 10 days ago
▲ 602 r/spaceshuttle

Stephen Biesty's Orbiter cutaway from his 1992 book "Incredible Cross-Sections"

I posted Biesty's Saturn V illustration on the Apollo reddit a couple of days ago, so I thought I would be interesting to share this earlier work of his. Considering that the book was published in 1992, it presents a very early/mid 80s version of the Shuttle - everyone's wearing blue coveralls, the Pilot still has his Launch Entry Helmet on, and the horizontal stabilizer and sides are liberally festooned in white tiles. The version in Incredible Cross-Sections even featured a detailed view of an MMU in the bottom right corner, and also showed a female astronaut sitting on the toilet with the urine hose obscuring the bits you couldn't show in a kid's book, which isn't in this version for some reason.

Still, I'm sure a lot of young space geeks (myself included) got this book as a present in the early 90s spent a lot of time staring at it in wide-eyed wonder.

u/MrSubnuts — 13 days ago
▲ 406 r/spaceshuttle

Space shuttle tile

I got this from a friend maybe 35 years ago. Is anyone able to tell me where on the Shuttle it came from??

u/LighthouseMoon — 14 days ago
▲ 28 r/spaceshuttle

Mars Climate Orbiter didn't fail because of a unit conversion it failed because nobody verified the software against a spec that already existed

Quick context most retellings skip: NASA's Software Interface Specification for this mission was published in 1996, two years before launch, and it explicitly required newton-seconds for thruster data. The contractor's ground software (a program called SM_FORCES) put out pound-force seconds instead — a factor-of-4.45 error that fed directly into the navigation team's trajectory model for the entire cruise to Mars. 

What I find more interesting than the unit mix-up itself: engineers noticed the spacecraft's angular-momentum desaturation events were happening 10-14x more often than expected, and separately, Doppler tracking data kept suggesting a closer approach to Mars than the official trajectory predicted. Neither discrepancy got resolved before the orbital insertion burn on Sept 23, 1999. 

I made a documentary going through the full timeline, sourced to the Mishap Investigation Board's Phase I report — happy to share if anyone's interested, but mostly wanted to discuss the "systemic verification failure" angle since most coverage flattens this into a punchline about metric vs. imperial units.

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u/PrestigiousSummer919 — 13 days ago