The 135th and final flight of America’s space shuttle fleet landed safely at the Kennedy Space Center early Thursday – ending the three-decade lifetime of a technologically remarkable and versatile spacecraft, the likes of which the world is unlikely to see for a very long time.
The shuttle Atlantis and its four crew members touched down in Florida at 5:56 a.m., shortly before sunrise, after a 13-day mission to the International Space Station, the now-completed space laboratory that could never have been built without the huge cargo-carrying capacity of the shuttle.
“After serving the world for over 30 years, the space shuttle’s earned its place in history. And it’s come to a final stop,” radioed commander Christopher Ferguson.
“Job well done, America,” replied mission control.
Ferguson and the rest of the crew — pilot Doug Hurley, and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim — had been awakened hours earlier with Kate Smith’s rendition of “God Bless America.”
Ferguson said the shuttle “has changed the way we view the world, and it’s changed the way we view our universe.”
Atlantis left the space station Tuesday after delivering a year’s worth of supplies. The one million-pound station, which took 12 years and 37 shuttle flights to build, is clearly the most enduring legacy of the shuttle program. Now formally designated as a national science laboratory and orbiting 250 miles above Earth, the station is just beginning to perform the science that was always planned for it.
Together, the 135 shuttle flights logged more than 537 million flight miles in low-Earth orbit.
Hailing the space shuttle and its astronauts, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said after touchdown that the program was responsible for a long number of “firsts.” But he also focused on what’s to come.
“This final shuttle flight marks the end of an era, but today, we recommit ourselves to continuing human spaceflight and taking the necessary — and difficult — steps to ensure America’s leadership in human spaceflight for years to come,” Bolden said.
“Children who dream of being astronauts today may not fly on the space shuttle ... but, one day, they may walk on Mars. The future belongs to us. And just like those who came before us, we have an obligation to set an ambitious course and take an inspired nation along for the journey.”
One of the shuttle’s final missions was to deploy an eight-pound micro satellite, the last of 180 satellites and observatories large and small that took off from the shuttle. The spacecraft, first conceived in the late 1960s, was initially designed to be a launch pad for many more and larger vehicles, but that promise was never fulfilled.
The three remaining active shuttles will be decommissioned and put on display – the Discovery at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center museum outside Washington, Endeavour to the California Science Center Los Angeles and Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center. Two other shuttles, Challenger and Columbia, failed in 1986 and 2003, killing 14 astronauts.
With no American spacecraft available to fly to the space station, it will now be re-staffed using Russian Soyuz spaceships and re-supplied by Russian and possibly European and Japanese capsules. The administration is also promoting a program to speed the development of private spaceships that are expected to begin providing services in several years as well.
While the ballooning cost of the shuttle — now costing as much as $1 billion per launch — and its two tragedies have somewhat tarnished its image and legacy, its achievements are real. It is the only winged vehicle to ever orbit in space, it travelled at speeds of up to 17,500 mph and it withstood temperatures of as much as to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit on re-entry.
It was also used to launch the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories, and made five trips to the Hubble to repair and upgrade it. In addition, it made possible a level of international cooperation in space never seen before, especially between the United States and Russia.
During its 30 years in service, 356 individual astronauts have flown the shuttle (many multiple times), including astronauts from 16 other nations.
Soon after Atlantis landed, the tributes began.
“Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis will fly no more,” Robert S. “Bob” Dickman, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics said in a statement. “Some see this as an end, but it is not.
“Thirty years of shuttle missions, and of learning, growing, and improving, will not be forgotten: calluses and scar tissue; joy and tears; plots on strip charts and real-time visualizations; gauges and glass cockpits; prayers for safe flight and, yes, prayers of grieving; looking back and looking ahead. The legacy of the shuttle era will be with us as long as humans journey from Earth to space.”