Milk Run To the Heavens

A round-trip truck and bus for space

Hail Columbia, officially designated a Space Transportation System (S.T.S.), and known as the space shuttle or the shuttle orbiter for short. The shuttle, to make it even shorter, is the most powerful and complicated craft ever put together by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Apollo capsules that went to the moon are Model T artifacts in comparison. Columbia, with booster rockets and fuel tank, weighs 2.7 million Ibs.; it is controlled by computers loaded with more than 600,000...

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