Between 1983 and 1998, Spacelab provided NASA with a vital short-term laboratory in space. Across more than a dozen missions, Spacelab’s pressurized research modules and science pallets supported hundreds of experiments from the life to microgravity sciences, from Earth science to astrophysics and from materials processing to fluid dynamics. The very same international co-operation that led to Spacelab’s genesis also conspired to create its end. Science writer Ben Evans chronicles this tumultuous history, showing how, as tensions between the superpowers cooled in the 1990s and the Shuttle came to be increasingly used to fly joint missions to Mir, many Spacelab missions were delayed and eventually cancelled. weiterlesen