10 Out-of-this-World Space Shuttle Fun Facts You Won't Believe!

1. Spaced-out Origins

Did you hear the one about the space shuttle designer? It's really out of this world! The punchline is that Maxime Faget wasn't the only mastermind behind reusable spacecrafts: The idea had been floating around since the 1950s and was proposed by several individuals and organizations, including the Air Force and the RAND Corporation. So, while Faget played a big part, he wasn't the sole rocket man behind the concept.
Source => space.stackexchange.com

2. Cosmic Baristas

Space shuttles: the original barista of the skies – brewing an explosive concoction of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, one fiery launch at a time: This delightful cosmic barista whips up potent mixtures of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, resulting in water vapor exhaust and a liftoff show that can be witnessed from miles away, combining power, efficiency, and jaw-dropping spectacle like no other.
Source => nytimes.com

Did you know astronauts Stafford and Cernan faced a fiberglass blizzard aboard Apollo 10 and turned into space janitors? Discover their cosmic clean-up adventure!

=> Fun Facts about Apollo

3. Shuttle Parking Woes

Landing a space shuttle is like trying to park a bus at a McDonald's drive-thru – it requires some serious finesse and limited options: Due to its design, the Space Shuttle had a single chance for landing and no propulsion for aborted landings, resulting in primarily landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Edwards Air Force Base in California, with backup sites like commercial airports and military bases as well as an emergency landing at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico for Columbia in 1982.
Source => simpleflying.com

4. Lift-off for Dummies

Lift-off for Dummies: When in doubt, strap on the largest solid rocket boosters the universe has ever seen and hold on tight! On a serious note: The Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters were the biggest ever flown, each producing a heart-stopping 3 million pounds of maximum thrust during liftoff.
Source => en.wikipedia.org

5. Discovery's Frequent Flyer Status

If the Discovery was a frequent flyer, it'd be a platinum member by now with enough points to live on the moon: This space shuttle is NASA's oldest and most traveled, having spent 365 days in space across 39 flights, and journeyed a whopping 148,221,675 miles (238,539,663 km), which is like going to the moon and back over 300 times!
Source => space.com

6. Juno's Insane Speed

Whoosh goes the celestial speedster, zooming past cosmic traffic with ludicrous velocity – eat its space dust, Earthly commuters: The NASA Juno probe holds the record as the fastest space-traveling craft ever, breezing at a whopping 165,000 mph (266,000 km/h) when it settled into orbit around Jupiter in 2016 – leaving our space shuttles feeling seriously sluggish in comparison!
Source => spacequotations.com

7. Hubble's Room Service

If the Hubble Space Telescope were a restaurant critic, it must've loved the room service it got from those high-flying space shuttles – they just couldn't resist giving it a check-up and upgrade: Between 1990 and 2002, the famous telescope was launched on STS-31 and later pampered with not one, but four exquisite servicing missions by space shuttle crews, making it the world's top-notch peeping Tom for celestial wonders for over 30 glorious years.
Source => space.com

8. Hubble House Calls

Hubble, Hubble, toil and trouble: space shuttles and astronaut-medics made house calls to the Hubble Space Telescope five times between 1993 and 2009, replacing batteries, gyroscopes, and upgrading its tech to keep it going strong. This cosmic maintenance work not only secured Hubble's future but set the standard for servicing other astronomical equipment in space.
Source => hubblesite.org

9. Canadarm: Celestial Crane

A celestial crane, operating without a union but adored by astronauts: The Space Shuttle's Canadarm was a robotic arm capable of handling payloads up to 65,000 pounds, repairing and deploying satellites, and even providing a mobile scaffold or footrest for astronauts during spacewalks – but, alas, never for playing zero-gravity catch.
Source => en.wikipedia.org

10. The Rock and Shuttle Lift-offs

Talk about a heavyweight liftoff: imagine Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and 6.59 million of his equally muscly friends all pushing a shuttle into the sky! In reality: space shuttles used the largest solid-propellant rocket motors ever flown, generating 6.6 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and accounting for 83% of the total thrust needed for escape. Bonus: these solid rocket boosters were recoverable and reusable after each launch, making space travel a bit more budget-friendly.
Source => cram.com