Atlantis Sinks Into History

The space shuttle Atlantis returned home from its 32nd and final voyage today, ending the flight plans of the second oldest active ship in the fleet. Final flights for Discovery and Endeavour later this year will end the space shuttle program. Atlantis will stand by as a rescue ship for the very last shuttle flight, then head to a museum somewhere.

The shuttle came back "really, really clean," with just a couple of dings in its thermal shielding, said NASA officials who were out on the runway with crew and shuttle workers. Before the 2003 Columbia disaster, shuttles regularly landed with hundreds of nicks and even gouges, but redesigned fuel tanks took care of that problem (hence no more exploding shuttles). Launch manager Mike Moses noted how often NASA officials now describe a just-returned shuttle as one of the cleanest they'd ever seen. "That's actually the truth. Each one is just getting better and better," he said, not seeing the worthlessness of that statement with only a pair of flights remaining.

Atlantis — the fourth to fly in NASA's shuttle series — is ending its run after spending a total of 294 days in orbit and circling Earth 4,648 times. It has carried 189 astronauts and visited the International Space Station 11 times. It also flew seven times to Russia's old Mir station and once to the Hubble Space Telescope. The shuttle added another 4.8 million miles during its just-completed trip to the space station, for a grand total of 120,650,907 miles over its lifetime. The 120 millionth mile was logged shortly after midnight.

Some at NASA are holding out hope that Atlantis could make one more supply run to the space station next summer, provided no rescue mission is needed for Endeavour's flight, but it will cost around $200 million a month to keep the shuttle program operating beyond December. Once the shuttles retire for good, Americans will keep hitching rides to the space station on Russian rockets until U.S. private enterprise is able to take over - one of the goals set forth by President Obama earlier in the year. The new focus of the American space program is towards asteroids and Mars in the next few decades.