The fourth of the US space shuttles. It made its first flight on 3 October 1985 with a crew of five.
In 1989 Atlantis launched the Cassini spacecraft on a six-year journey to the planet Jupiter and in 1995 undertook the first of seven missions to dock with the Russian space station Mir, exchanging crew members. After a refit in 1997–8, it resumed service with a series of launches from mid-1999 in support of the International Space Station (ISS), and on 14 February 2001 successfully delivered the US science laboratory module Destiny to the ISS. After the Columbia shuttle tragedy in 2003, when the shuttle broke up on re-entry, Atlantis was one of the three remaining shuttles, along with Discovery and Endeavour. It was named after a research vessel at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts active from 1930 to 1966.
The upgraded interior of the space shuttle Atlantis. Nicknamed the ‘glass cockpit’, the new multifunction electronic display subsystem (MEDS) gives clear graphical displays of spacecraft attitude and flight properties.
Credit: NASA
A legendary island said to have been submerged following an earthquake nearly 12,000 years ago. Plato describes Atlantis in a myth, leading some people to suggest it was the Minoan civilization on Crete, destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Thera (Santorini) in 1500 bc.
- cost centre
- cost curve
- cost-effectiveness
- Costello, John A. (1891–1976)
- Coster, Dirk
- cost estimation
- cost estimation model
- cost function
- cost inflation
- cost, insurance, and freight
- cost minimization
- cost of capital
- cost of cracking adjustment
- cost of living index
- cost of protection
- Costonian
- cost per click
- cost per thousand page views
- cost-plus pricing
- cost-push inflation
- cost(s)
- cost schedule
- cost surface
- cost–benefit analysis
- cost–space convergence