CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — At exactly 11:29 a.m. Friday, space shuttle Atlantis both lifted off from Kennedy Space Center and lowered the curtain on a momentous era in America’s human space program.
Atlantis is making one final run to the International Space Station (ISS), ferrying 8,000 pounds of much needed supplies. When it returns from its 12-day mission, it will join its sister orbiters — Endeavour and Discovery — as a museum piece.
Atlantis was NASA’s fourth operational shuttle, making its maiden voyage on Oct. 3, 1985. As of blastoff, the spacecraft has completed a journey of more than three decades, 293 days, 4,648 Earth orbits and 120 million miles. In all, Atlantis flew 33 missions, deployed 14 satellites — including the planetary probes Magellan and Galileo — docked seven times with the now deorbited Russian MIR space station and 12 times with the ISS. Atlantis was also the first shuttle to service the Hubble Space Telescope.
Carrying just four veteran crewmembers — commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim — STS-135 is the smallest mission since 1983.
Despite being given only a 30 percent chance of launch due to inclement weather, STS-135 roared spectacularly into orbit, cheered on by an estimated 1 million onlookers throughout Florida’s space coast. Among them was Todd Seip, a middle school science teacher from Pueblo participating in the NASA Tweetup, a formal gathering of 150 invited social media users who spent two days touring the space center, listening to lectures from astronauts, scientists and engineers, and culminating with a view of the launch from the press site.
“The emotions of the past couple days have been overwhelming,” Seip said. “I’m looking at this experience through my students’ eyes. The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve tried to think, ‘If I could have brought them with me, what would I have shown them?’ I will take this unique experience back with me for them.”
Atlantis’ launch is bittersweet. It marks not only the end of the shuttle program, but also the beginning of end, in the opinion of many lawmakers, former astronauts and industry executives, of America’s leadership in space.
Last year, President Obama killed Constellation, NASA’s program to return astronauts to the moon. When Atlantis rolls to a stop on the runway on the 20th, the United States will no longer possess the technology to launch a human being into space, nor does it have any future exploratory vehicle on the drawing board. For now, the space agency will buy ISS-bound astronauts seats on the Russian Soyuz.
“My parents had Apollo, and the space shuttle was my generation’s spaceship. But now there’s a gap — there’s a spaceship missing,” lamented Seip. “Students just like mine, hopefully some of mine, will be the ones who will design and build NASA’s next spacecraft. It gives me a lot of hope that this isn’t the end, but rather the start of a whole new chapter in space.”
