How fast does the space shuttle travel?

The system launched with two solid rocket boosters and the orbiter's three main engines, fed by the large external tank. The solid boosters burned out after two minutes, when the stack was traveling at about 4,800 km/h at 45 km altitude, and fell into the Atlantic under parachutes to be reused. The three main engines kept burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen for another six and a half minutes, until the orbiter reached about 7.8 km/s, around 28,000 km/h. The external tank then separated and was destroyed on reentry; with a brief burn of its orbital engines, the shuttle circularized its orbit between 300 and 400 km.

The shuttle was the only vehicle capable of covering the entire speed spectrum: it orbited at Mach 25, glided at hypersonic, supersonic, and subsonic speeds, and landed like an airplane. Reentry began with a braking burn of barely 90 m/s over the Indian or Pacific Ocean. An hour later, the orbiter plunged into the atmosphere with its nose pitched up 40 degrees, and the tiles on its belly withstood more than 1,600°C as friction dissipated the energy. A series of S-turns let it shed speed without overheating.

At about 25 km from the runway, the shuttle was still supersonic; it crossed the sound barrier in reverse at about 15 km altitude, with its double sonic boom audible from the ground. With no engines, it descended on a glide path seven times steeper than a commercial airliner's and touched down at about 350 km/h, deploying a drag parachute. Across 135 missions between 1981 and 2011, five orbiters flew that profile.