The command module of the Apollo 11 spacecraft that took three US astronauts to the Moon in 1969. Columbia was piloted by astronaut Michael Collins, who remained in lunar orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the surface in the lunar module, known as Eagle.

A NASA space shuttle that was used on 27 successful flights from 12 April 1981 to 1 March 2002. Known as OV-102 (for Orbiter Vehicle-102), it was NASA's oldest shuttle, being the first to fly into Earth orbit. Its flights included carrying the first science payload in November 1981, the first four-person crew in November 1982, the first six-person crew in November 1983, and the first to be commanded by a woman, Eileen Collins, in July 1999. On 1 February 2003, the vehicle broke up and burned on re-entry and the crew of seven died. The apparent cause was a hole in the heat shield of a wing, caused just after lift-off by foam insulation that had broken off.

Columbia was named after an eighteenth-century sloop from Boston, Massachusetts, that made the first American circumnavigation of the globe.

Space shuttle Columbia takes off from Kennedy Space Center in 1993. Mission STS-58 was designed to study the performance of the human body in space. Columbia, the longest-serving of NASA’s five space shuttles, is named after the sloop used by Robert Gray to explore the coast of British Columbia in 1792.

Credit: NASA