Fish-eye view of the Space Shuttle Atlantis as seen from the Russian Mir space station during the STS-71 mission. (Courtesy of NASA)

The Space Shuttle Orbiter Program
During the 1970s, the focus of the American space program shifted to the development of a national space transportation system, the central element of which would be a fleet of reusable space shuttles.

In 1972 Rockwell International (renamed from “North American Rockwell” that same year) was awarded a key contract, and the Downey plant once again had an historic role to play in the space program: the subassembly and component manufacture and testing of the first reusable spacecraft – the Space Shuttle orbiters. Over the next 13 years, six orbiters were constructed at the Downey plant: The Enterprise (test craft), the Columbia, the Challenger, the Discovery, the Atlantis, and the Endeavor.

	Orbiter 101 Crew Module Interior [February 27, 1976]

Boeing bought Rockwell’s aerospace and defense business in 1996 and continued on a smaller scale at the Downey plant to provide design support for the next generation of missiles, customer-required shuttle modifications and payload-cargo integration, until 1999, when the remaining activities were relocated to other sites and the NASA site was closed.

Discovery (OV-103), the third of NASA's fleet of reusable, winged spaceships, arrived at Kennedy Space Center in November 1983. It was launched on its first mission, flight 41-D, on August 30, 1984. It carried aloft three communications satellites for deployment by its astronaut crew. Other Discovery milestones include the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope on mission in April 1990, the launching of the Ulysses spacecraft to explore the Sun's polar regions on mission in October of that year and the deployment of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) in September 1991. (Courtesy of NASA)