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STS-103 Commander Curtis L. Brown Jr. and his fiancee, Ann Brickert, smile for the camera on the runway at Patrick Air Force Base. The STS-103 crew and their families are preparing to board an airplane that will return them to their home base at the Johnson Space Center in Houston following the successful completion of their mission. Discovery landed in darkness the previous evening, Dec. 27, on runway 33 at KSC's Shuttle Landing Facility at 7:00:47 p.m. EST. This was the first time that a Shuttle crew spent the Christmas holiday in space. The other STS-103 crew members are Pilot Scott J. Kelly and Mission Specialists Steven L. Smith, C. Michael Foale (Ph.D.), John M. Grunsfeld (Ph.D.), Claude Nicollier of Switzerland and Jean-François Clervoy of France. The STS-103 mission supplied the Hubble Space Telescope with six new gyroscopes, six new voltage/temperature improvement kits, a new onboard computer, a new solid state recorder and new data transmitter, and a new fine guidance sensor along with new insulation on parts of the orbiting telescope. This was the 96th flight in the Space Shuttle program and the 27th for the orbiter Discovery KSC-99pp1517
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STS-103 Commander Curtis L. Brown Jr. and his fiancee, Ann Brickert, smile for the camera on the runway at Patrick Air Force Base. The STS-103 crew and their families are preparing to board an airplane that will return them to their home base at the Johnson Space Center in Houston following the successful completion of their mission. Discovery landed in darkness the previous evening, Dec. 27, on runway 33 at KSC's Shuttle Landing Facility at 7:00:47 p.m. EST. This was the first time that a Shuttle crew spent the Christmas holiday in space. The other STS-103 crew members are Pilot Scott J. Kelly and Mission Specialists Steven L. Smith, C. Michael Foale (Ph.D.), John M. Grunsfeld (Ph.D.), Claude Nicollier of Switzerland and Jean-François Clervoy of France. The STS-103 mission supplied the Hubble Space Telescope with six new gyroscopes, six new voltage/temperature improvement kits, a new onboard computer, a new solid state recorder and new data transmitter, and a new fine guidance sensor along with new insulation on parts of the orbiting telescope. This was the 96th flight in the Space Shuttle program and the 27th for the orbiter Discovery
The Space Shuttle program was the United States government's manned launch vehicle program from 1981 to 2011, administered by NASA and officially beginning in 1972. The Space Shuttle system—composed of an orbiter launched with two reusable solid rocket boosters and a disposable external fuel tank— carried up to eight astronauts and up to 50,000 lb (23,000 kg) of payload into low Earth orbit (LEO). When its mission was complete, the orbiter would re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and lands as a glider. Although the concept had been explored since the late 1960s, the program formally commenced in 1972 and was the focus of NASA's manned operations after the final Apollo and Skylab flights in the mid-1970s. It started with the launch of the first shuttle Columbia on April 12, 1981, on STS-1. and finished with its last mission, STS-135 flown by Atlantis, in July 2011.
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