Space Shuttle orbiter

A procedural model built in Blender from the type’s published dimensions, painted as The Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery, OV-103, which first flew into space on 30 August 1984, made 39 spaceflights, more than any other orbiter, among them both return-to-flight missions after the Challenger and Columbia losses and the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and has been displayed since April 2012 at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly, Virginia: NASA’s reusable winged spacecraft, with a long, flat-sided fuselage carrying a two-deck crew cabin behind the nose and a 60 ft payload bay under clam-shell doors (shown closed), a low double-delta wing with elevons, a swept fin with a split rudder that opened as a speed brake, a body flap under the tail, two orbital manoeuvring engine pods either side of the fin and three main-engine nozzles (replicas, as displayed), shown standing on its tricycle undercarriage with the gear doors open: the weathered thermal protection system as it came back from its last flight, with black heat-resistant tiles over the underside, nose and lower sides, dark grey carbon-carbon on the nose cap and wing leading edges and off-white insulation blankets above, ‘Discovery’ on both sides of the forward fuselage, the US flag, ‘United States’ and the NASA insignia on the payload bay sides, the flag and ‘Discovery’ on the starboard wing and the NASA insignia on the port wing, as photographed at Udvar-Hazy (no orbiter is in a UK museum; shape from the National Park Service’s measured drawings of Discovery, HAER TX-116-A, at one scale for all views; the tiles are drawn as a regular pattern rather than tile by tile, and the yellow display stands are left off). Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · all 370 models · download .glb (2.9 MB) · Plate 342 in The Hangar