Bush's moon-oriented Constellation program, which President Barack Obama cancelled last year. The new path Griffin referred to was laid out by President George W. "We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can." "It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," then-NASA chief Michael Griffin told USA Today in 2005.
Indeed, some NASA officials have voiced dissatisfaction with the agency's post-Apollo focus on the shuttle and the International Space Station, which shuttle missions have helped build since 1998. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). "It kept us limited to low-Earth orbit," said space policy expert John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington Universtity and author of "John F. Instead, since 1981, the shuttle has kept zipping around the planet over and over again, just a few hundred miles above Earth's surface. But it's been four decades since the last manned lunar landing, and in that time, NASA has made little discernible progress toward the next logical giant leap: getting people to Mars. After all, NASA's Apollo programput boots on the moon in 1969, just 12 years after the space age began. There is merit to that argument, experts say. (Image credit: NASA)Ī chief criticism of the shuttle program is that it prevented more ambitious manned exploration missions. Astronaut Paolo Nespoli snapped this view and others during the first-ever photo session of a shuttle docked at the space station. Atlantis landed for the final time at the Kennedy Space Center on 21 July 2011.īy the end of its final mission, Atlantis had orbited the Earth a total of 4,848 times, traveling nearly 126,000,000 mi (203,000,000 km) or more than 525 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.Ītlantis is named after RV Atlantis, a two-masted sailing ship that operated as the primary research vessel for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 1930 to 1966.The space shuttle Endeavour and International Space Station shine front and center in this amazing (and historic) photo of the two vehicles docked together as seen from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. STS-135 took advantage of the processing for the STS-335 Launch on Need mission that would have been necessary if STS-134's crew became stranded in orbit. STS-134 by Endeavour was expected to be the final flight before STS-135 was authorized in October 2010.
Its maiden flight was STS-51-J from 3 to 7 October 1985.Ītlantis embarked on its 33rd and final mission, also the final mission of a space shuttle, STS-135, on 8 July 2011. Constructed by the Rockwell International company in Southern California and delivered to the Kennedy Space Center in Eastern Florida in April 1985, Atlantis is the fourth operational and the second-to-last Space Shuttle built. Space Shuttle Atlantis (Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV‑104) is a Space Shuttle orbiter vehicle belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the spaceflight and space exploration agency of the United States. Displayed at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.ģ06 days, 14 hours, 12 minutes, 43 seconds as of STS-135ġ25,935,769 miles (202,673,974 km) as of STS-135 Atlantis in orbit in 2010, during STS-132