Atlantis clears the tower; the shuttle program's last mission is airborne
Thirty years after the shuttle program began, NASA had one flight left. On July 8, 2011, Atlantis lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at 11:29 a.m. with Commander Christopher Ferguson, Pilot Douglas Hurley, and Mission Specialists Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim aboard, carrying more than 9,400 pounds of supplies to the International Space Station. Thirteen days later, Atlantis landed at Kennedy Space Center for the last time, closing out the Space Shuttle program's 135 missions, with 207 individuals having flown aboard Atlantis alone over its 33 missions. The shuttle era was over.
STS-135 ended America's ability to launch its own astronauts, a gap that lasted until SpaceX's Crew Dragon flew in May 2020. In the meantime, the United States paid Russia for seats on Soyuz rockets to reach a station built largely with shuttle flights. The most capable spacecraft America ever built retired to a museum while its successor was still years from the pad.
QWhy did NASA end up flying a mission it hadn't originally planned?
STS-135 existed only because NASA had built a safety net for the previous flight. STS-134's crew aboard Endeavour needed a rescue option in case they got stranded on the ISS, so NASA readied a contingency mission called STS-335 with hardware and a crew already assigned. When Endeavour landed safely and no rescue was needed, NASA authorized that standing plan as an actual flight in October 2010. Funding wasn't locked in until a continuing resolution and the April 2011 federal budget came through, months after Congress had already approved the mission on paper. The last shuttle flight in history began as an insurance policy nobody expected to use.
QWhat nickname did shuttle workers give Atlantis, and why?
Ground crews at Kennedy Space Center called Atlantis "Britney," a joke about its reputation for pre-launch drama. Compared to its fleet-mates, Atlantis was known for throwing more problems that needed fixing during processing, the kind of last-minute glitches that kept technicians scrambling before a launch. The nickname stuck among the workforce even as Atlantis went on to fly some of the program's most significant missions, including seven straight trips to the Russian station Mir and the final Hubble servicing flight. A spacecraft with a reputation for high-maintenance quirks ended up closing out the entire 30-year program.
QWhat saved Atlantis during its most damaging flight in 1988?
During the launch of STS-27, insulation shed from a solid rocket booster and struck Atlantis's underside, tearing into more than 700 tiles and ripping one away completely. That missing tile sat directly over a steel L-band antenna plate, which took the brunt of the reentry heat that the tile would normally have absorbed. The crew survived what became the single worst tile damage any shuttle sustained and still landed successfully. Investigators later pointed to a similar kind of debris strike, unaddressed, as a cause of the Columbia disaster in 2003.
