The last Space Shuttle returned to Earth 15 years ago
So, how are those commercial replacements working out for you, NASA?
This week marks 15 years since a Space Shuttle last returned from orbit and the end of NASA's Space Shuttle program. Space Shuttle Atlantis landed at the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at Kennedy Space Center 15 years ago this week, marking the final mission for the program. STS-135 was originally designated STS-335, the Launch On Need (LON) mission for the previous STS-134 flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour.
LON missions had been a feature of the Space Shuttle program following the Columbia disaster. If a Space Shuttle was damaged, another could be launched at short notice to rescue the crew. NASA assigned Launch On Need flights separate STS-3xx designations, so the rescue mission for STS-116 was STS-317, STS-117 was STS-318, and so on.
There were exceptions (a notable one was the STS-125 Hubble servicing mission, which had STS-400 ready to go if anything went wrong), but the Space Shuttle program should have ended with STS-134. However, lawmakers and NASA managers opted to make STS-135 the final Space Shuttle mission. There could be no Launch On Need mission waiting in the wings this time around – the Space Shuttle program was being wound down – so the crew would have had to come down from the International Space Station (ISS) aboard Soyuz capsules if Atlantis could not return to Earth safely.
There were also only four crew members, a figure not seen since the STS-6 mission of Challenger in 1983. The crew was commanded by Christopher Ferguson, who would later join Boeing's Commercial Crew Program and was assigned to (although did not fly) Boeing's calamity capsule, the Starliner. The pilot for STS-135 was Douglas Hurley, who went on to fly the first crewed test flight of SpaceX's Crew Dragon in 2020.
Rounding out the crew were mission specialists Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim. The launch occurred on July 8, 2011, and Atlantis returned from orbit on July 21, bringing the Space Shuttle program to a conclusion. It wasn't, however, the end of crewed spaceflight for the
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