The Space Shuttle: 10. Return to flight

13 Minutes Presents: The Space Shuttle

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, History

9.5 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The space shuttle is back. Discovery stands waiting on launchpad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. It has taken more than two years to get here. Nasa has listened and changed. After all these months of work, this should be one of the safest missions ever flown.

But as Discovery finally rises skyward, the Challenger disaster is on everyone’s mind. There are unspoken questions about the very future of spaceflight.

Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

13 Minutes Presents: The Space Shuttle is a BBC Audio Science Unit production for the BBC World Service.

Hosted by space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg, and produced by Russell Emanuel, for Bleeding Fingers Music.

Archive: Return to flight, Nasa Archives, 1988 Ronald Reagan speaks at STS-4 launch, Reagan Library, 1982 STS-26 coverage, CNN, CBS News, BBC, 1988 Mission audio and oral histories, Nasa History Office

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:05.6	Your time starts now.
0:07.2	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
0:09.4	Absolutely right.
0:11.4	So, you might like to know that the BBC makes loads of other podcasts.
0:15.6	Really?
0:16.4	Wow.
0:17.2	Many of them are very funny.
0:19.1	Which I think means...
0:20.3	A hatful of ha haas.
0:21.7	And energy!
0:41.3	Even if we do say so ourselves. I agree 100% of us. Find them all on BBC Sounds. Just tell us a joke. Come on, tell us a joke. Tell us a joke. Come on, tell us a joke. Just search comedy on BBC Sounds. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in. Before we start the 10th and final episode of 13 Minutes Presents the Space Shuttle, don't forget we have two previous seasons.
0:44.3	Season 1 is the story of the first moon landing and the final 30 minutes of descent to the moon,
0:51.3	when everything started going wrong.
0:53.3	And season 2 is about the near disaster
0:56.2	of Apollo 13. Both seasons are available right now on our waiting for you once you finish this
1:02.8	episode. Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.
1:18.8	This is shuttle launch control, and we are at T-minus nine minutes and holding.
1:24.5	It's the 29th of September, 1988, almost midday.
1:30.0	A machine, as tall as a 14-floor apartment block,
1:31.9	towers on the launch pad.
1:34.5	Its space shuttle, Discovery,
	...

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