Engineering film footage of the final shuttle launch

Two years after it paraded through the streets of Los Angeles following a cross-country ferry flight from Florida, the space shuttle Endeavour was loaded with a Spacehab logistics module ahead of the orbiter’s planned transition to a vertical display on a mock launch pad in 2018.

Sixty years ago Monday, a 27-year-old Russian test pilot named Yuri Gagarin strapped into a Vostok capsule in Central Asia and rode into orbit atop a launcher derived from a Soviet nuclear missile, becoming the first human to travel into the void of space. Twenty years later, in 1981, the era of reusable spacecraft dawned with the first launch of NASA’s space shuttle.

Thirty years ago Friday, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched aboard the shuttle Discovery with a famously flawed mirror, the opening chapter in an improbable saga of redemption and scientific discovery that revolutionized humanity’s view of the cosmos with jaw-dropping images now familiar to millions.