Space Shuttle landing at Edwards, the orbiter was flown back to the KSC on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a specially modified Boeing 747. The first orbiter, "Enterprise", was built in 1976, used in Approach and Landing Tests and had no orbital capability. Four fully operational orbiters were initially built: "Columbia", "Challenger", "Discovery", and "Atlantis". Of these, two were lost in mission accidents: "Challenger" in 1986 and "Columbia" in 2003, with a total of fourteen astronauts killed. A fifth operational (and sixth in total) orbiter, "Endeavour", was built in 1991 to replace "Challenger". The Space Shuttle was retired from service upon the conclusion
The Ticket That Exploded to nova-" The Ticket That Exploded The Ticket That Exploded is a 1962 novel by American author William S. Burroughs, published by Olympia Press and later by Grove Press in 1967. Together with "The Soft Machine" and "Nova Express" it is part of a trilogy, referred to as "The Nova Trilogy", created using the cut-up technique, although for this book Burroughs used a variant called 'the fold-in' method. The novel is an anarchic tale concerning mind control by psychic, electronic, sexual, pharmaceutical, subliminal, and other means. Passages from the other two books and even from this book show up in