Re: Black boxes
There is no "black box" as such, although some types of data may be stored on board the Shuttle. The reason such a black box would be largely extraneous is that most of the data on the Shuttle is transmitted back to the ground in real time (thank goodness.) Airliners are not equipped to do this...yet.
Unfortunately, this was not true of the many experiments on board, and almost all of that data was lost.