The recovered remains of the orbiter are mostly buried in a missile silo located at Cape Canaveral LC-31, though some pieces are on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. ==History== Challenger was named after HMS Challenger, a British corvette that was the command ship for the Challenger Expedition, a pioneering global marine research expedition undertaken from 1872 through 1876.
The recovered remains of the orbiter are mostly buried in a missile silo located at Cape Canaveral LC-31, though some pieces are on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. ==History== Challenger was named after HMS Challenger, a British corvette that was the command ship for the Challenger Expedition, a pioneering global marine research expedition undertaken from 1872 through 1876.
The Apollo 17 Lunar Module, which landed on the Moon in 1972, was also named Challenger. ===Construction=== Because of the low production volume of orbiters, the Space Shuttle program decided to build a vehicle as a Structural Test Article, STA-099, that could later be converted to a flight vehicle.
The contract for STA-099 was awarded to North American Rockwell on July 26, 1972, and construction was completed in February 1978.
The contract for STA-099 was awarded to North American Rockwell on July 26, 1972, and construction was completed in February 1978.
Work on converting STA-099 to operational status began in January 1979, starting with the crew module (the pressurized portion of the vehicle), as the rest of the vehicle was still being used for testing by Lockheed.
STA-099 returned to the Rockwell plant in November 1979, and the original, unfinished crew module was replaced with the newly constructed model.
By early 1981, most of these components had returned to Palmdale to be reinstalled.
Work continued on the conversion until July 1982, when the new orbiter was rolled out as Challenger. Challenger, as did the orbiters built after it, had fewer tiles in its Thermal Protection System than Columbia, though it still made heavier use of the white LRSI tiles on the cabin and main fuselage than did the later orbiters.
Named after the commanding ship of a nineteenth-century scientific expedition that travelled the world, Challenger was the second Space Shuttle orbiter to fly into space after Columbia, and launched on its maiden flight in April 1983.
In addition, three consecutive Spacelab missions were conducted with the orbiter in 1985, one of which being the first German crewed spaceflight mission.
Passengers carried into orbit by Challenger include the first American female astronaut, the first American female spacewalker, the first African-American astronaut, and the first Canadian astronaut. On its tenth flight in January 1986, Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after liftoff, killing the seven-member crew of STS-51-L that included Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space.
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