curious question from a newbie

[Pangloss]

Hehe, no worries.

 

Apollo was the program that went to the moon. It used Saturn rockets.

 

The space shuttle was never designed or intended to go to the moon.

 

Atlas rockets were used during the earlier Mercury program, to launch the first American into orbit (John Glenn, if I spelled that right).

 

[JustStuit]

lol, thanks for the update. I got them pretty confused.

[Ophiolite]

It's much easier to remember them when you lived through it all.

As PanGloss noted the first American in orbit was John Glenn. He made three orbits, and yes PG, you did spell it correctly.

Glenn went on to become a US senator and went into space again in the shuttle, in 1998 at the age of 77. (This time he made 134 orbits.)

The first American in space was Al Shephard, who made a sub-orbital flight aloft a Redstone rocket. (That was basically a slightly enlarged V2 designed by von Braun and his team at Huntsville.) He made one further space flight, a moon landing with Apollo 14, in 1971.

[ctc7752]

No, there are only a few locations that can handle a mass as large as the shuttle and the windows are only the places where all the calculations for a landing at these sites are possible.