ATSC HDTV broadcasting in the United States is inaugurated with the launch of the STS-95 space shuttle mission.

Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards are an international set of standards for broadcast and digital television transmission over terrestrial, cable and satellite networks. It is largely a replacement for the analog NTSC standard. Like NTSC, ATSC is used mostly in the United States, Mexico, Canada, South Korea, and Trinidad and Tobago. Several former NTSC users like Japan have not used ATSC during their digital television transition, because they adopted other systems like ISDB developed by Japan and DVB developed in Europe, for example.

High-definition television (HDTV) describes a television or video system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since at least 1933; in more recent times, it refers to the generation following standard-definition television (SDTV). It is the standard video format used in most broadcasts: terrestrial broadcast television, cable television, and satellite television.

STS-95 was a Space Shuttle mission launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida on 29 October 1998, using the orbiter Discovery. It was the 25th flight of Discovery and the 92nd mission flown since the start of the Space Shuttle program in April 1981. It was a highly publicized mission due to former Project Mercury astronaut and United States Senator John H. Glenn Jr.'s return to space for his second space flight. At age 77, Glenn became the oldest person to go into space, a record that remained unbroken for 23 years until 82-year-old Wally Funk flew on a suborbital flight on Blue Origin NS-16, launching on 20 July 2021, which in turn was broken by William Shatner at age 90 on 13 October 2021 and then by Ed Dwight on May 19, 2024. Glenn, however, remains the oldest person to reach Earth orbit. This mission is also noted for inaugurating ATSC HDTV broadcasting in the U.S., with live coast-to-coast coverage of the launch. In another first, Pedro Duque became the first Spaniard in space.