Space Shuttle at Kennedy Space Center in the year after the "Columbia" disaster that had taken the life of Indian-American astronaut KC Chawla. On television, the 1996 drama "The Cape" portrays the lives of a group of NASA astronauts as they prepare for and fly Shuttle missions. "Odyssey 5" was a short-lived sci-fi series that features the crew of a Space Shuttle as the last survivors of a disaster that destroys Earth. The 1997–2007 sci-fi series "Stargate SG-1" has a shuttle rescue written into an episode. The 2013 film "Gravity" features the fictional Space Shuttle "Explorer" during STS-157, whose crew are killed
Space Shuttle retirement for space access systems in the 1970s also, such as the Rockwell "Star-raker" Star-raker was a large single-stage to orbit design that used both rockets and ramjet for propulision. It was a contemporary to the Boeing "Reusable Aerodynamic Space Vehicle", which an all-rocket propulsion single-stage to orbit design. For comparison to an earlier retirement, when the Saturn IB was last flown in 1975 for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the Shuttle development program was already well underway. However, the Shuttle did not fly until 1981, which left a six-year gap in U.S. manned spaceflight. Because of this and other reasons, in