Space Shuttle in Orbit Coloring Page: Free PDF Sheet

The Space Shuttle Program

A Spacecraft Built to Fly Again

Before the space shuttle, every American spacecraft was used once and discarded after splashing into the ocean. The shuttle changed that by landing like a glider on a runway and flying again on a later mission, with the orbiter Discovery alone completing 39 flights over its career. That reusable design was meant to make spaceflight cheaper and more routine, turning trips to orbit into scheduled missions rather than one-time events.

The shuttle launched vertically like a rocket, riding two solid rocket boosters and a large external fuel tank that separated once their fuel was spent, but it returned to Earth completely differently - gliding back through the atmosphere with no engine power at all, using its delta-shaped wings purely to steer toward the runway during the final descent.

The Delta Wing and a Fiery Return

The shuttle's wide delta-shaped wings, visible in this scene, were specifically designed to handle the intense heat and stress of atmospheric reentry while still allowing enough lift to glide and land precisely. Thousands of individual heat-resistant tiles covered the shuttle's underside, some capable of withstanding temperatures above 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit as friction with the atmosphere turned the orbiter into a controlled fireball during descent.

Because the shuttle had no engines running during landing, astronauts sometimes called it a "flying brick" - it had only one real chance to line up with the runway and touch down, with no option to circle around and try again if the approach was off. Commanders trained extensively in modified jets to practice that unpowered glide before ever flying a real mission.

Five Orbiters and Three Decades of Flight

NASA built five space-worthy shuttle orbiters - Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour - flying a combined 135 missions between the program's first launch in 1981 and its final flight in 2011. Discovery flew the most missions of any orbiter, while Endeavour was built as a replacement after the Challenger disaster in 1986, one of two tragedies, along with the loss of Columbia in 2003, that led to major safety redesigns across the program.

The shuttle fleet carried the pieces that assembled the International Space Station in orbit, launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, and later flew several servicing missions to repair and upgrade Hubble's instruments, extending the telescope's working life by decades.

Life Inside the Payload Bay

Behind the shuttle's crew cabin sat a large cargo area called the payload bay, big enough to carry satellites, space station modules, or an entire science laboratory called Spacelab on a single mission. A robotic arm mounted along the payload bay, nicknamed the Canadarm, let astronauts grab satellites for repair or gently lift heavy station modules into place without ever leaving the safety of the shuttle.

A typical shuttle mission lasted around 5 to 16 days, with a crew of up to seven astronauts living and working in a cabin roughly the size of a large van. After retirement in 2011, all four remaining orbiters became museum exhibits, letting visitors stand beneath the same delta-winged spacecraft that once carried astronauts, satellites, and station modules into the same open sky shown in this coloring page.