“The orbiter is a completely different vehicle than anything that has ever flown in space.” It was a work platform, a spacewalk platform, a construction site with a robotic arm, a laboratory, a people mover. It was a complex vehicle operating at the edge of its performance, with very little margin for error,” John Shannon, program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston told Air & Space magazine in March.
Read more:
Truckin’ Up to Low Earth Orbit–the Shuttle Era Is Go for History, Part 1