

He is a food and agricultural economist with a focus on applied microeconomics. Ken Tenbusch is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University. According to the design of each Space Shuttle orbiter, a total of 100 launches over ten years were considered acceptable. Could the space shuttle ever be used again? A Space Shuttle is made up of four basic components: an orbiter spacecraft, two solid rocket boosters, an external tank for storing fuel, and three main engines. NASA’s Space Shuttle fleet was retired in March 2011 in favor of alternative transportation options. The shuttle flow process involves the processing of each vehicle from the moment it touches the ground until it exits the island. Director of Shuttle Flow Ken Tenbusch explains how shuttles work. Only the external fuel tank, which burns up in the atmosphere as it approaches the earth’s surface after it is launched, is possible to reuse most of the components. The Orbiter Processing Facility has now been relocated to the Vehicle Assembly Building, where processing takes place in place of the internal tanks. The process was used for all subsequent space shuttle missions until the final mission of the space shuttle program, STS-135, which launched on July 8, 2011.Ī shuttle flows through the air as soon as a vehicle lands. The shuttle flow process was used for the first time on STS-1, the maiden flight of the space shuttle Columbia, which launched on April 12, 1981. The orbiter would then be mated with its external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters, and the entire stack would be moved to the launch pad on a crawler-transporter. Under the shuttle flow process, an orbiter would arrive at the Kennedy Space Center on a 747 carrier aircraft and be moved to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). This process was designed to increase the efficiency of the space shuttle assembly process by moving the orbiters (the reusable space shuttle vehicles) through the assembly facilities on a continuous basis. In 1977, a new assembly process called “shuttle flow” was implemented at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
