KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLA. -- The orbiter Columbia completes the short journey from Orbiter Processing Facility Bay 1 to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). During its approximately one-week stay inside the VAB, the spaceplane will be mated to the external tank and twin solid rocket boosters, and electrical and mechanical interfaces will be verified. Rollout to Launch Pad 39B is planned for Oct. 16, where the two primary payloads of the upcoming STS-80 mission -- the Wake Shield Facility-3 (WSF-3) and Orbiting and Retrievable Far and Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrograph-Shuttle Pallet Satellite-2 (ORFEUS-SPAS-2) -- will be installed. Liftoff on the final Shuttle flight of 1996 is targeted for no earlier than Nov 8 at 2:47 p.m. EST KSC-96pc1159

The Space Shuttle program was the United States government's manned launch vehicle program from 1981 to 2011, administered by NASA and officially beginning in 1972. The Space Shuttle system—composed of an orbiter launched with two reusable solid rocket boosters and a disposable external fuel tank— carried up to eight astronauts and up to 50,000 lb (23,000 kg) of payload into low Earth orbit (LEO). When its mission was complete, the orbiter would re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and lands as a glider. Although the concept had been explored since the late 1960s, the program formally commenced in 1972 and was the focus of NASA's manned operations after the final Apollo and Skylab flights in the mid-1970s. It started with the launch of the first shuttle Columbia on April 12, 1981, on STS-1. and finished with its last mission, STS-135 flown by Atlantis, in July 2011.