CENTAUR G-PRIME TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION: A HIGH-PERFORMANCE UPPER STAGE FOR THE NASA SPACE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM The well-known and powerful Centaur upper stage, used with the Atlas and Titan boosters for decades, was a natural choice for an upper stage for the Space Shuttle. A new version of the Centaur, Shuttle-Centaur (aka STS-Centaur), was built by General Dynamics/Convair. The first Shuttle-Centaur stage and its payload (the Galileo mission to Jupiter) were being prepared for flight at Kennedy Space Center on the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. A suddenly more risk-averse...