The Space Shuttle was “America’s Ride To Space” for 3 decades, it launched over 100 times, and yet over that long career it only launched 3 interplanetary missions – Magellan, Galileo and Ulysses. And all of those were launched in 2 years, after that everything the Shuttle carried remained in Earth orbit.
Multiple factors came together to limit this:
– The Shuttle was late and expensive
– The Reagan administration cancelled most interplanetary missions
– Challenger’s destruction changed NASA’s policy requiring all launches on shuttle.
Magellan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_(spacecraft)
Galileo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(spacecraft)
Ulysses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft)
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