Senator Mark Kelly
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
That is in the beginning, the infancy of a test program.
Right.
And the last space shuttle flight was the one after my last one, the 135 times.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons they hired test pilots for this job.
Right.
By the time we ended the space shuttle program, there was still a lot we did not understand about it.
So long ago.
Yeah.
And it took us in the space shuttle.
The first flight was in 1981.
My that 108th flight was in 2001, 20 years later.
Yeah.
And to go to fly the next 30 flights took another decade.
Yeah, we didn't fly a lot.
Yeah.
It was expensive.
It also took a lot to get the space shuttle orbiter ready for a mission.
Yeah.
You basically take it all apart and put it back together every time, which might not have been the smartest thing to do.