The Space Shuttle's Lessons For The Future

By Frank Morring, Jr.
Washington

The second flight of the space shuttle Atlantis was almost its last.

What was then NASA’s newest orbiter sustained severe damage to its fragile thermal protection system when it lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B on Dec. 2, 1988. But through a combination of military secrecy and plain old human misunderstanding, the ...

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