Plans were well underway to launch the Space Shuttle at Vandenberg in the early 1980s. The shuttle was what a rocket could never be: A flying aircraft with a human pilot. The insulting phrase for ...

For adults, there's the incredibly realistic Artemis Space Launch System ... let you recreate your very own scale model of the Space Shuttle Discovery, it also comes with a Hubble Telescope.

It was the second, the Columbia, that had the honor of being the first space shuttle to launch into orbit. It blasted off on April 12, 1981, exactly two decades after Yuri Gagarin became the first ...

According to NASA, it stood at only 184 feet when stacked on the launch pad. That's still shorter than a Falcon 9 rocket — and a Space Shuttle orbiter by itself measures only 122 feet long.