Illustrated in full color. From the foreword: "This NASA Technical Publication explores and documents the nature of Space Shuttle operations and its supporting infrastructure in order to address fundamental questions often asked of the Space Shuttle Program-why does it take so long to turn the Space Shuttle around for flight and why does it cost so much? To accomplish this, the report provides an overview of the cause-and-effect relationships between generic flight and ground system design characteristics and resulting operations by using actual cumulative maintenance task times as a relative...