While NASA celebrated the launch of its first Space Shuttle in 1981, the Soviet Union was racing to build its own orbital spacecraft using publicly available American technical data and Cold War ...

Paul Weitz, a retired NASA astronaut who commanded the first flight of the space shuttle Challenger and also piloted the Skylab in the early 1970s, has died. He was 85. Weitz died at his retirement ...

Seen in this historic photo from the U.S. space agency, the first Space Shuttle External Tank, or the Main Propulsion Test Article, entered NASA history on September 9th, 1977, when it rolled off of ...