Atlantis flew the final mission of the Space Shuttle program in July 2011, closing thirty years of winged spaceflight. With the fleet retiring and no rescue Shuttle available, the mission flew with a pared-down crew of just four, who would have relied on Russian spacecraft to come home one at a time had anything gone wrong. Millions watched the last launch.
The crew delivered a year's worth of supplies and spare parts to the International Space Station in an Italian cargo module, stocking the outpost for the post-Shuttle era. After undocking and a final journey around the planet, Atlantis glided home to a night landing in Florida, wheels stopping for the last time. The moment ended an era: the reusable spaceplane that had launched satellites, telescopes and laboratories, and built a station, had flown its last, and America's astronauts would ride other vehicles to orbit.
Atlantis lifted off on 8 July 2011 with four people aboard — the smallest Shuttle crew since 1983, and deliberately so. With no other orbiter available to mount a rescue, the contingency plan was for the crew to shelter aboard the station and come home one at a time on Russian Soyuz vehicles over the following year, and four was the largest number the seats could absorb.
The cargo was mundane and telling: a logistics module packed with food, spare parts and equipment, stockpiling the station against the coming gap in American launch capability. Chris Ferguson, Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim spent nearly nine days docked, transferring some four tonnes of supplies by hand, the least glamorous work imaginable and exactly what was needed.
They left behind a small American flag that had flown on STS-1 in 1981, attaching it to a hatch as a prize for the next crew to arrive on an American spacecraft launched from American soil — a wait that turned out to last nine years, until a Dragon capsule docked in 2020 carrying Doug Hurley himself. Atlantis touched down before dawn on 21 July 2011, and Ferguson's final call from the runway noted that the vehicle had earned its place in history. Over thirty years, 135 missions had carried 355 people, built two space stations, launched and repaired a telescope that rewrote cosmology, and killed fourteen astronauts.
