Wednesday · November 11, 2026
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Shuttle program's 100th flight lifts off; Discovery carries a truss for the space station

Seven astronauts head for orbit with the first piece of permanent exterior framework the station has ever carried.

Nineteen years after the shuttle fleet began flying, NASA finally reached its hundredth mission. On October 11, 2000, Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying the Z1 truss, two Control Moment Gyros, and a docking adapter bound for the International Space Station. Commander Brian Duffy led a seven-member crew, including pilot Pamela Melroy, on a flight that spent a week docked to the station and sent astronauts outside four separate times. It was the shuttle program's hundredth launch and Discovery's twenty-eighth…

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More from October 11
1906

San Francisco orders Japanese and Korean pupils into the city's "Oriental School"

Tokyo's newspapers call it an insult to national honor, and Washington takes notice.
1968

Apollo 7 lifts off from Cape Kennedy; America flies astronauts again

Twenty-one months after the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts on the pad, a Saturn IB carries three more into orbit.
1984

Sullivan steps outside Challenger; first American woman to walk in space

Over the next three and a half hours she and David Leestma pumped hydrazine into a mock satellite to prove orbiting spacecraft could be refueled.
19101776 Club
Arch Hoxsey carries Roosevelt twice around a St. Louis park, four and a half miles, in a Wright biplane.
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More from Modern America
1997

Atlantis lifts off at night, headed for a wounded Russian station

Commander James Wetherbee's crew carries a French astronaut, David Wolf as a replacement for Michael Foale, and a repair spacewalk.
1993

By dawn, a relief convoy finally reaches the surrounded Americans in Mogadishu

Seventeen hours after the first Black Hawk fell, Pakistani and Malaysian armor opens a corridor out of the city.
2008

MESSENGER finds a 716-kilometer scar on Mercury's southern hemisphere

The second of three planned flybys doubles as a gravity-assist maneuver and a discovery run.
2001

American bombs fall on Afghanistan; Bush says "time is running out"

Air strikes hit Taliban defenses and al-Qaeda camps as U.S. special forces move in to back the Northern Alliance.
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