Background
The Space Transportation System program originated in the late 1960s, as a means of reducing the cost of spaceflight by introducing a reusable spacecraft. The final agreed design would feature a reusable spaceplane, a disposable external tank and reuseable solid-fuel rocket boosters. The contract to build the spaceplane, which eventually came to be known as the "shuttle orbiter", was awarded to North American Aviation (later Rockwell International), with the first complete orbiter rolled out in 1976. Originally planned to be named Constitution (due to its completion being in the year of the United States Bicentennial), it was eventually decided that the prototype would bear the name Enterprise.
Read more about this topic: Approach And Landing Tests
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)