The Shuttle Ends Its Final Voyage and
an Era in Space
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: July 21, 2011
The last space shuttle flight rolled to a stop at 5:58 a.m. on
Thursday, closing an era of the nation’s space program.
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Joe Raedle/Getty Images Space shuttle Atlantis lands at the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday.
Related
Lens Blog: A Space Album From Planet Earth (July 21, 2011)
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NASA, via Associated Press An infra-red image of the space shuttle Atlantis after it touched down at the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday.
NASA, via Associated Press The International Space Station seen from the space shuttle Atlantis as it flew away on Tuesday.
"Mission complete, Houston," said Capt. Christopher J. Ferguson of the Navy, commander of the shuttle Atlantis for the last flight. "After serving the world for over 30 years, the space shuttle has earned itsplace in history, and it’s come to a final stop."
It was the 19th night landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to end the 135th space shuttle mission. For Atlantis, the final tally of its 26-year career: 33 missions, accumulating just short of 126 million miles during 307 days in space.
A permanent marker will be placed on the runway to mark the final resting spot of the space shuttle program.
The last day in space went smoothly. Late Wednesday night, the crew awoke to the Kate Smith version of “God Bless America.” With no weather or technical concerns, the crew closed the payload doors at 2:09 a.m. Thursday.
At 4:13 a.m., Barry E. Wilmore, an astronaut at mission control in Houston, told the Atlantis crew, “Everything is looking
maneuver on time.”
“That’s great, Butch,” replied Captain Ferguson. “Go on the deorbit maneuver, on-time.”
Thirty-six minutes later, as it was passing over Malaysia, the Atlantis fired its maneuvering engines for 3 minutes, 16 seconds, slowing it down by 225 miles per hour and beginning the fall back into the Earth’s atmosphere.
The shuttle, which travels backward while in orbit, flipped around to a nose-first position. In the clear, windless predawn, sonic booms announced the shuttle’s impending arrival, a wide turn and then the final approach to landing.
During the 13-day mission, the Atlantis ferried 8,000 pounds of supplies and spare parts to the International Space Center. With the retirement of the shuttles, the space station will now rely on Russian, European and Japanese rockets to bring up supplies.
NASA is also counting on two commercial companies, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, Calif. and Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virgini., to begin cargo flights next year.
For Atlantis, NASA will now begin the work of transforming it into a museum piece. It will be mounted nearby at Kennedy’s visitor center.
In Endeavour’s Final Act,
the Supporting Cast
Draws Outsize Attention
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Capt. Mark E. Kelly, the
commander of the space shuttleEndeavour, said Tuesday
that his wounded wife, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of
Arizona, was “more than medically ready” to travel to Florida for the launching.
Captain Kelly said on arriving at the space center from Houston that Ms. Giffords, who has spent the past three months in a Houston rehabilitation hospital recovering from being shot in the head in an assassination attempt, would be coming to Florida “pretty soon.”
“It’s something she’s been looking forward to for a long time,” he told reporters gathered here for the launching, scheduled for 3:47 p.m. Friday. “She’s been working really hard so that her doctors would permit her to come.”
Captain Kelly and five other astronauts are to lift off on Friday for a 14-day mission to the International Space
Station. His wife will watch from a private viewing area, and aside from a possible news photograph or two of the scene,
the public will not get a glimpse of her.
But her expected appearance — her doctors cleared her for travel early in the week — has made this liftoff, the next-to-last in the shuttle program, one of the most anticipated in years.
Her plans have overshadowed the expected appearance of
President Obama — which would be the first in-person
viewing of a launching by a president since 1998 — and the details of the mission itself, which is to deploy a particle-physics experiment that is one of the most ambitious and expensive scientific instruments ever lofted to orbit.
So far, preparations for this mission have been relatively free of the kinds of technical problems that have delayed shuttle
flights in the past. On Tuesday, NASA officials were
optimistic about the weather for Friday, although they said there was a potential for high winds that could force a
postponement for a day or longer.
Mr. Obama’s visit to the center will be his first since last
April, when in a speech he tried to win over NASA employees for his administration’s blueprint for space exploration. It was a tough sell, since those plans called for scrapping a
program to return to the Moon in favor of a longer-term goal of exploring deeper space. He also called for a shift to private companies and away from NASA in the development of new
space hardware.
Since the speech, the administration and Congress canceled NASA’s manned launcher project, the Ares 1 rocket. Just last week, NASA awarded $269 million to four companies in a second round of financing to develop new spacecraft to take astronauts into orbit.
As if to underscore the changing nature of the space
program, representatives of some of those companies were on hand at the space center this week to discuss their efforts. But commercial launchings of astronauts are years away. For now, NASA will rely on Russian rockets, this flight of the
Endeavour and the final shuttle flight, by the Atlantis,
scheduled for late June.
The Endeavour mission is the 134th in the program and the 25th for the spacecraft. The shuttle was built to replace the Challenger, which broke apart shortly after liftoff in 1986, killing all seven astronauts aboard. NASA announced this month that the Endeavour would eventually end up in a science museum in Los Angeles.
But before it heads into retirement it has a busy fortnight ahead. Among the objects in its cargo bay is a box of spare parts for the International Space Station. Astronauts will conduct four spacewalks to perform maintenance on the
station, and the mission may be extended two days to perform more upkeep.
But the mission’s most high-profile task is to install a $2
billion particle detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer,
on the space station’s external truss, where it will sit until the station is abandoned, perhaps in 2020 or later.
The spectrometer, the long-gestating brainchild of Sam Ting,
a Nobel physics laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, consists of a giant magnet and detectors that
together act as a cosmic sifter, looking for evidence of the
elusive “dark matter” that is thought to pervade the universe.
The project has been in the works for nearly two decades, and Dr. Ting and his team of collaborators from 16 countries are hoping for a smooth ascent on Friday after years of what could only be described as a bumpy ride. After the loss of the Columbia and its seven astronauts in 2003, the experiment was pulled from the shuttle program, then resurrected five years later after intensive lobbying by Dr. Ting, who has proved to be as much a salesman as a physicist in his long career.
In the past year, Dr. Ting himself was responsible for another delay in the project, deciding to replace the
instrument’s huge superconducting magnet with a weaker one. The reason, he explained at the time, was that the
superconducting magnet required liquid helium to keep it cool, and the helium would run out in a few years. The weaker magnet requires no cooling liquid, and can last as long as the station.
April 26, 2011
Making Do With a
Plywood Spaceship
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
The Museum of Flight in Seattle had anticipated for years that it would receive for its new $12 million,
15,000-square-foot Space Gallery one of four space shuttles that NASA was
to give away. But when the winners were announced this
month, Seattle was not among them. Instead, the museum
will get a shuttle trainer used by astronauts before they went into space. It is made of plywood and does not have wings. Douglas R. King, the museum’s chief executive, discusses.
Q. You had been planning for a shuttle for years. You had
legislators pushing for it. You built a special climate-controlled building. What happened?
A. Well, there’s only four of them. We’ve actually been
working on this for 10 years — longer, even. We wanted to make sure we had this very important artifact. The first letter
program, so you could say 25 years. Having a building had been one of the original criteria, but that didn’t seem as important to them in the end as population and access to global markets. I can’t argue that New York and Los Angeles aren’t bigger than us.
Q. What was your response when NASA announced its
decision?
A. A shuttle would have been our first choice. I won’t
pretend we’re not disappointed, but we’re moving forward.
Q. What are the plans for the Space Gallery?
A. We will have a full-size mockup of the space shuttle — a
full fuselage shuttle trainer. It looks exactly like the shuttle except that it doesn’t have wings. One advantage is that because it is not a priceless artifact like the shuttle, we’ll be able to use it for educational purposes. Some people, but not everyone, will be able to go inside. They won’t be able to do that with the shuttles. The trainer is about the size of a 747. The tail is 56 feet high. From the outside it will look exactly like the shuttle except for the wings.
Q. You raised $9 million in public donations to build the
Space Gallery. Were contributors upset once they heard the gallery wouldn’t actually house a shuttle?
everything we could to get it. I don’t feel like this is a consolation prize. I was very impressed with the way the community accepted this so quickly.
Q. Is the museum going to need to change its marketing
strategy? Will the admission price you must have had penciled in stay the same?
A. We never got tremendously ramped up for it. We always
knew there was a lot of competition, that it was always an “if.” I know I’m sounding Pollyanna-ish, but we won’t just be attracting people to come to see the Space Shuttle, we’ll be representing the entirety of the space program now.
With ‘Coolest Job Ever’ Ending,
Astronauts Seek Next Frontier
Col. Pamela Ann Melroy, with Col. George D. Zamka at the Kennedy Space Center in 2007, left NASA in 2009.
Garrett E. Reisman, left, recently left NASA for SpaceX, a private company. “It was very, very difficult to voluntarily leave,” he said.
April 23, 2011
With ‘Coolest Job Ever’
Ending, Astronauts Seek
Next Frontier
By KENNETH CHANG
What happens when you have the right stuff at the wrong time?
Members of NASA’s astronaut corps have been asking just
that, now that the space shuttle program is ending and their
odds of flying anywhere good anytime soon are getting smaller. The Endeavour is scheduled to launch this week,
and the Atlantis is supposed to fly the last shuttle mission in
June — and all the seats are spoken for.
who now works for a company that wants to offer space flights for tourists. “This is a time of great uncertainty.”
Under President Obama, NASA’s human spaceflight
program has been curtailed. The Ares I and Constellation programs, which were meant to succeed the space shuttles and take astronauts to the moon, were canceled, and NASA is instead hiring outside companies to devise alternatives. So when the Obama family heads to the Kennedy Space
Center in Florida this week to sit with Gabrielle Giffords, the
injured Arizona congresswoman, as she watches her
husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly of the Navy, take off for the
International Space Station, it will be one of the last
spectacles of its kind for a while. Over the next few years, American astronauts will be competing for a handful of slots on the International Space Station, flying there on Russian
Soyuz capsules.
“We hope we will overcome this hurdle and continue to explore,” said Peggy A. Whitson, the head of NASA’s
astronaut office, whose job includes selecting the astronauts who will fly each space mission. While people’s spirits are a little down, she said, “we’ll have to see — NASA has gone through different phases like this before.”
The current situation may not dampen the career aspirations of the elementary school set, but last year alone, 20
astronauts left NASA’s active-duty roster; today, 61 remain, down from a peak of about 150 in 2000. Back then, NASA was gearing up to staff the International Space Station and the shuttles that supplied it.
The shift has made a big difference to people like John M.
Grunsfeld, the Dr. Fix-It of the Hubble Space Telescope, who
has flown five missions for NASA. After his last flight, in May 2009, he asked Dr. Whitson about his chances of returning to space. “She was honest,” Dr. Grunsfeld said. “Slim to none.”
If Dr. Whitson had dangled even a small chance at a plum assignment, like commanding the International Space
Station, “I probably would have stayed,” said Dr. Grunsfeld, 52. But she did not. So in January 2010, he left NASA to
become deputy director of the Space Telescope Science
Institute in Baltimore, which operates the Hubble.
Another astronaut for whom the new realities presented a problem was Capt. Scott D. Altman of the Navy, who has flown four missions for NASA. But at 6-foot-4, he does not fit into a Soyuz capsule.
After his last shuttle flight in 2009, Captain Altman, 51, saw the writing on the wall. As he wrestled with the decision over whether to leave NASA, the Obama administration made the decision to scrap Constellation and Ares I. He announced
last August that he would depart.
Leaving NASA “was the right decision,” Captain Altman said, but “there are some regrets from time to time.” He now
works for ASRC Research and Technology Solutions in
Maryland, which does engineering work for NASA and other federal agencies.
NASA will still be hiring astronauts, though not people of Captain Altman’s vintage. In the next year or two, as more people leave or retire, the agency will recruit a new class of 6 to 12 astronauts, Dr. Whitson said. If NASA decides to
reduce tours of duty at the space station from six months to four, that would mean a need for even more astronauts. “We briefed the entire office on what to expect,” said Dr. Whitson, who is herself an astronaut.
Meanwhile, opportunities for astronauts outside of NASA are small but growing.
Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s empire, is seeking
three space pilots for its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, which may begin space tourism trips next year. While
SpaceShipTwo will take suborbital hops that provide only a few minutes of weightlessness, other companies — like
Boeing and the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation,
be able to fly to the International Space Station and elsewhere.
Garrett E. Reisman, who joined the astronaut corps in 1998, left NASA last month for SpaceX, which was founded by the
Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk. Dr. Reisman had logged
more than three months in space and done work on the space station’s robotic arm.
“Being an astronaut is the coolest job ever,” said Dr.
Reisman, 43. “It was very, very difficult to voluntarily leave.” If Dr. Reisman had stayed at NASA, he would have had a chance to fly again, but he decided to move on. Now he is working on a rocket (the Falcon 9) and a spacecraft (the Dragon) that are meant to take passengers and cargo to the space station.
“It’s an engineer’s dream to design a spaceship,” he said. “To me, it seems like we’re on the verge of a golden age of
spaceflight — that’s where I wanted to be.”
For every astronaut who quits NASA because of age or a lack of opportunity, there are any number of young people
aspiring to fill their shoes.
The job is still as romantic as the standards are stringent. According to NASA’s Web site, astronaut candidates must be able to swim three lengths of a pool in a flight suit and tennis
shoes; an advanced degree in science or math is a plus. The requirements are even stricter for people who want to work in the space station: you must speak Russian, know robotics, be trained for spacewalks and be healthy enough to spend six months in space.
This formidable checklist has helped NASA nudge some astronauts aside. But it has not dulled anyone’s memories. “Being in space is like being someplace magic,” said Col. Pamela Ann Melroy of the Air Force, the second female astronaut to command a shuttle mission. She left NASA in 2009, knowing that there would be intense jockeying by astronauts seeking to command one of the few remaining flights.
“I didn’t really want to get into situation where I was hanging around hoping that I would get one of them,” she said.
Colonel Melroy is still wistful about the lost prospect of flying on the Ares I. “That would have been a hoot,” she said.