Spiro Agnew in the context of "1976 United States presidential election"

The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program name was the Space Transportation System (STS), taken from the 1969 plan led by U.S. vice president Spiro Agnew for a system of reusable spacecraft where it was the only item funded for development.

The first (STS-1) of four orbital test flights occurred in 1981, leading to operational flights (STS-5) beginning in 1982. Five complete Space Shuttle orbiter vehicles were built and flown on a total of 135 missions from 1981 to 2011. They launched from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Operational missions launched numerous satellites, interplanetary probes, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), conducted science experiments in orbit, participated in the Shuttle-Mir program with Russia, and participated in the construction and servicing of the International Space Station (ISS). The Space Shuttle fleet's total mission time was 1,323 days.

Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 5, 1968. The Republican ticket of former Vice President Richard Nixon and Maryland governor Spiro Agnew defeated the Democratic ticket of incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Edmund Muskie and the American Independent Party ticket of former Alabama governor George Wallace and general Curtis LeMay. The election cycle was tumultuous and chaotic, and is often characterized as one of the most violent in American history. It was marked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in early April and the subsequent 54 days of riots across the US; the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in early June; and widespread opposition to the Vietnam War across university campuses as well as at the Democratic National Convention, which saw police crackdowns on protesters, reporters, and bystanders.

Incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson was the early frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, but withdrew from the race after only narrowly winning the New Hampshire primary. Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert F. Kennedy emerged as the three major candidates in the Democratic primaries until Kennedy was assassinated. Humphrey, who supported the Vietnam War, defeated the anti-war McCarthy to win the Democratic nomination, sparking protests. Humphrey's promise to continue the Johnson administration's war on poverty and support for the civil rights movement eroded his support in the South, prompting a third-party run by Wallace that campaigned for racial segregation on the basis of "states' rights." Wallace attracted socially conservative voters throughout the South (including Southern Democrats and former Barry Goldwater supporters), as well as white working-class voters in the North and Midwest through his economic populism and anti-establishment rhetoric.

Richard Nixon's tenure as the 37th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 1969, and ended when he resigned on August 9, 1974, in the face of almost certain impeachment and removal from office, the only U.S. president ever to do so. He was succeeded by Gerald Ford, whom he had appointed vice president after Spiro Agnew became embroiled in a separate corruption scandal and was forced to resign. Nixon, a prominent member of the Republican Party from California who previously served as vice president for two terms under president Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961, took office following his narrow victory over Democratic incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey and American Independent Party nominee George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election. Four years later, in the 1972 presidential election, he defeated Democratic nominee George McGovern, to win re-election in a landslide. Although he had built his reputation as a very active Republican campaigner, Nixon downplayed partisanship in his 1972 landslide re-election.

Nixon's primary focus while in office was on foreign affairs. He focused on détente with the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, easing Cold War tensions with both countries. As part of this policy, Nixon signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and SALT I, two landmark arms control treaties with the Soviet Union. Nixon promulgated the Nixon Doctrine, which called for indirect assistance by the United States rather than direct U.S. commitments as seen in the ongoing Vietnam War. After extensive negotiations with North Vietnam, Nixon withdrew the last U.S. soldiers from South Vietnam in 1973, ending the military draft that same year. To prevent the possibility of further U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over Nixon's veto.

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King Jr.; July 14, 1913 – December 26, 2006) was the 38th president of the United States from 1974 to 1977. A member of the Republican Party, Ford assumed the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon, under whom he had served as the 40th vice president from 1973 to 1974 following the resignation of Spiro Agnew. Prior to that, he served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949 to 1973.

Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan, where he played for the university football team, before eventually attending Yale Law School. Afterward, he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1942 to 1946. Ford began his political career in 1949 as the U.S. representative from Michigan's 5th congressional district, serving in this capacity for nearly 25 years, the final nine of them as the House minority leader. In December 1973, two months after the resignation of Vice President Agnew, Ford became the first person appointed to the vice presidency under the terms of the 25th Amendment. After President Nixon resigned in August 1974, Ford immediately assumed the presidency.

Michael Stanley Dukakis (/dʊˈkɑːkɪs/ duu-KAH-kiss; born November 3, 1933) is an American politician and lawyer who was governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1979 and from 1983 to 1991. He is the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history and the second Greek-American governor in U.S. history, after Spiro Agnew. He was nominated by the Democratic Party for president in the 1988 election, losing to the Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Greek immigrants, Dukakis attended Swarthmore College before enlisting in the United States Army. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he won election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, serving from 1963 to 1971. He won the 1974 Massachusetts gubernatorial election but lost his 1978 bid for re-nomination to Edward J. King. He defeated King in the 1982 gubernatorial primary and was again governor from 1983 to 1991, presiding over a period of economic growth known as the "Massachusetts Miracle".

The Space Transportation System (STS), also known internally to NASA as the Integrated Program Plan (IPP), was a proposed system of reusable crewed space vehicles envisioned in 1969 to support extended operations beyond the Apollo program (NASA appropriated the name for its Space Shuttle Program, the only component of the proposal to survive Congressional funding approval). The purpose of the system was two-fold: to reduce the cost of spaceflight by replacing the existing method of launching capsules on expendable rockets with reusable spacecraft; and to support ambitious follow-on programs including permanent orbiting space stations around Earth and the Moon, and a human landing mission to Mars.

In February 1969, President Richard Nixon appointed a Space Task Group headed by Vice President Spiro Agnew to recommend human space projects beyond Apollo. The group responded in September with the outline of the STS, and three different program levels of effort culminating with a human Mars landing by 1983 at the earliest, and by the end of the twentieth century at the latest. The system's major components consisted of: