It cost $196billion over 40 years, ended the lives of 14 astronauts and managed to make less than half the flights promised. Its not crazy big, Thanga insisted. NASA's first space shuttle flight was in April 1981, the last was in July 2011. The space shuttle was sold to America as cheap, safe and reliable. By comparison, 40 launches were required to build the International Space Station, which sits in low-Earth orbit  far closer than the moon.
NASA's first space shuttle flight was in the year that ended more than one hundred years ago.
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(z0 / fly-01
    :ARG0 (z1 / research-institute
              :name (z2 / name
                        :op1 "NASA"))
    :ARG1 (z3 / shuttle
              :location (z4 / space))
    :ord (z5 / ordinal-entity
             :value 1)
    :time (z6 / year
              :ARG1-of (z7 / end-01
                           :time (z8 / before
                                     :quant (z9 / more-than
                                                :op1 (z10 / temporal-quantity
                                                          :quant 100
                                                          :unit (z11 / year)))
                                     :op1 (z12 / now)))))
NASA 's first space shuttle flight was in the year that ended more than one hundred years ago .
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