Space Shuttle Atlantis Lands Safely, Ending 30-Year Program
July 21, 2011, 10:02 AM EDTBy Simone Baribeau and Jerry Hart
(Updates with administrator’s comments in sixth paragraph.)
July 21 (Bloomberg) -- The space shuttle Atlantis landed in Florida today, completing the last of 135 missions over 30 years that delivered the Hubble telescope into orbit and helped build the International Space Station.
The four American astronauts, led by Commander Chris Ferguson, touched down at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 5:56 a.m. after a 13-day mission.
The trip brought “to a close 30 years of space shuttle history,” Ferguson said after disembarking following the pre- dawn landing. If “we continue with the next generation of space explorers, I consider our job here complete.”
With the shuttle’s return, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration leaves the business of low-Earth orbital flight and will use U.S. companies to develop spacecraft for taking people and cargo on short trips. It has partnerships with Boeing Co., Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and others to build such vehicles as it focuses on missions beyond the moon.
Charles Bolden, NASA’s administrator, vowed in May to take on the “more risky challenges of deep-space exploration.”
“The things that we’ve done have set us up for exploration in the future,” he said today after the Atlantis mission.
The shuttle’s demise will eliminate about 9,000 jobs in the region around the space center, according to Brevard Workforce, a county agency helping workers find new positions. That will deal a blow to the economy, said Debbie Russell, a clerk at Integrated Health Applications, a NASA contractor.
‘It’s Jobs’
“It’s the industry here -- it’s jobs,” Russell, who lives in Titusville, the closest town to the launch site, said in an interview yesterday. She didn’t know if she’d keep her post after September. “It’s kind of like when an automobile plant shuts down -- it affects the whole town.”
Gerald Griffin, 61, traveled from Meath, outside of Dublin, Ireland, to see the landing.
“It’s sad there hasn’t been more money put into research,” he said outside his hotel yesterday. “A lot of people fail to appreciate the significance of what has been achieved.”
The shuttle program began with the launch of Columbia in April 1981. Two orbiters were lost: Challenger exploded after liftoff in January 1986 and Columbia disintegrated on re- entering Earth’s atmosphere in February 2003.
The first flight of Atlantis, in October 1985, was a classified mission for the Defense Department. The spacecraft pioneered flights to the Russian space station Mir. In 1989, Atlantis was the first shuttle to launch a planetary probe, sending the Magellan spacecraft to Venus.
Supply Delivery
In its final mission, Atlantis carried supplies and spare parts to the space station in its 12th visit to the orbiting outpost, which currently houses six crew members. U.S. shuttles made 46 trips to the station, built by the space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.
Atlantis will remain at the Kennedy Space Center on display at the visitors’ center. Discovery will go to a Smithsonian Institution facility in Virginia and Endeavour heads for the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The shuttle prototype Enterprise will be housed at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City.
--With assistance from Dan Hart and Melissa Aparicio in Washington. Editors: Andrew Langley, Willy Morris, Mark Tannenbaum
To contact the reporters on this story: Jerry Hart in Miami at jhart@bloomberg.net Simone Baribeau in Miami at sbaribeau@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum at mtannen@bloomberg.net
