Plans were well underway to launch the Space Shuttle at Vandenberg in the early 1980s. The shuttle was what a rocket could never be: A flying aircraft with a human pilot. The insulting phrase for ...

had failed due to cold temperatures on the morning of the launch. The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the space shuttle program as NASA worked to redesign the spacecraft to prevent ...

Shuttle flights had become fairly routine at this point. But this mission would be the last successful mission before the disastrous launch of Space Shuttle Challenger just a few days after ...