Final Mission, New Possibilities

    This week in July is special because it marks a historic event, the last mission of the Space Shuttle.
    Currently Space Shuttle Atlantis is in its sixth day of a thirteen-day mission, STS-135, to the International Space Station.  Atlantis is bringing up the multi-purpose logistics module "Rafaello" along with supplies and spare parts to the ISS.  These parts and supplies will help the ISS continue to operate after the retirement of the shuttles.  STS-135 began on Friday, July 8, with the launch of Atlantis from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
    The Space Shuttles have been in operation for thirty years.  According to NASA, 355 individuals will have flown 852 times on 135 shuttle missions since STS-1 launched on April 12, 1981.  The five orbiters together have flown over 537 million miles, with space shuttle Atlantis being responsible for 120 million miles.  Its mission this week will add another five million miles to that total.  The shuttles have flown to Russian space station Mir 9 times and with STS-135 will have completed 37 missions to the ISS.
    Space Shuttle Atlantis was a part of several milestones during its career.  Its maiden voyage was on Oct. 3, 1985, on the STS-51-J mission flying materials for the Department of Defense.  In 1995 with STS-71, Atlantis first docked with space station Mir and marked the 100th U.S. manned space flight.  In October 2002 on STS-112 Atlantis made the first launch with a camera mounted on the shuttle's external tank, which captured the ascent to orbit.  In May 2009 Atlantis flew the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope on STS-125.
    Another first for mankind on STS-135 is the first iPhone flying into space aboard Atlantis.  The smartphone was brought in order to help experiments on the ISS.  A special application, SpaceLab for iOS, was developed for the mission by a Houston company, Odyssey Space Research.  A variant is available to earth-bound citizens, and allows them to simulate experiments in microgravity.  The shuttle also contains various memorabilia commemorating the final shuttle flight, such as more than 500 STS-135 mission patches.  You can read more in behind-the-scenes feature by NASA here on their web site.
    Future manned trips to the ISS will be conducted using Russian Soyuz spacecraft.  Supplies and spare parts will be brought on Russian Progress spacecraft, Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicles, as well as European Space Agency Automated Transfer Vehicles.  For American flights to the ISS, private sector contracts have been awarded to SpaceX corporation as well as Orbital Sciences corporation to develop commercial spacecraft.  These spacecraft would perform Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS.  These are still under development.
    The shuttles themselves will go to different corners of the country to serve as monuments of thirty years of effort and ingenuitiy.  Space Shuttle Atlantis will remain at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  Enterprise will reside at the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City, New York.  Shuttle Endeavour will be relocated to the California Science Center in Los Angeles, California.  Finally, Discovery will find a permanent home in the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Virginia.
    For further information about STS-135, NASA has an interactive Flash web page located here..