The December 1998 STS-88 mission via shuttle Endeavour started construction on the ISS; the first crew arrived at the station in 2000. In 2003, tragedy struck again, when the Columbia orbiter suffered a catastrophic failure upon re-entry, killing the crew about 15 minutes before their scheduled touchdown in Florida.
In all, however, the five orbiters — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — have flown more than 130 times and carried over 350 people into space. They traveled more than half a billion miles, which NASA said is more than enough to reach Jupiter.