CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- The last mission in NASA's decades-long space shuttle program is now underway.
Atlantis rocketed into orbit today at 11:29 a.m. EDT and is flying at 17,500 mph around the Earth. The mission, STS-135, will catch up with the International Space Station in two days.
The space shuttle launch marks the last in NASA's history, closing out a government-funded space program that lasted 30 years.
"The shuttle's always going to be a reflection of what a great nation can do when it commits to be bold and follow through," said astronaut Chris Ferguson, commander of the mission, from the cockpit of Atlantis just before pushing into space atop a billowing cloud of fumes. "We're completing a chapter of a journey that will never end. Let's light this fire one more time, and witness this great nation at its best."
During their 12-day mission, Ferguson and his three crewmembers -- veteran astronauts Doug Hurley, Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim -- plan to wrap up construction of the space station. They'll deliver a new room crammed with a year's worth of food, water and other supplies and perform a suite of experiments in orbit, including the test of a bag able to recycle urine and a space-based iPhone application. They expect to land July 20 at 7:06 a.m. EDT.
NASA's space shuttle program has encountered both glowing support and heated opposition throughout its history.
The space shuttle’s designers intended to make human spaceflight routine, safe and relatively inexpensive by launching the reusable spaceship 64 times per year at a cost of roughly $54 million (inflation-adjusted) per launch. In reality, the program averaged fewer than five launches a year and $1.5 billion per launch.
"It's a tough technical challenge to build a reusable spacecraft, and the president's Office of Management ... drew a line on how much money would be spent," said Wayne Hale, a former NASA mission manager who now works as a director of human spaceflight for Special Aerospace Services.
Early on, Hale said, the program never got the roughly $5 billion it needed to build a robust launch system that could handle 64 launches a year, so it was forced to make costly compromises. "If we really wanted to have something that would have flown as frequently, we would have spent more," he said.
But space-policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University thinks the shuttle was the wrong spacecraft altogether.
"Rather than lowering the costs of access to space and making it routine, the space shuttle turned out to be an experimental vehicle with multiple inherent risks, requiring extreme care and high costs to operate safely," he wrote in an op-ed published Wednesday by MIT Technology Review.
The space agency ultimately launched 135 space shuttle missions since 1981 at a total cost of about $209 billion. Two of the missions -- Challenger's last in 1986 and Columbia’s in 2003 -- ended catastrophically and claimed the lives of 14 astronauts.
For all its setbacks, however, the program is on schedule to complete the most ambitious orbital laboratory ever conceived. It also delivered (and repaired) the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as an army of other artificial satellites.
The future of U.S. human spaceflight won't end with the conclusion of Atlantis' mission. But the shape of things to come is uncertain.
No American spacecraft is ready to ferry astronauts to the space station during its anticipated 10-year lifespan. NASA is seeding money to commercial spaceflight companies to develop a human-ready spaceship, but the space agency expects a viable spacecraft to emerge no earlier than five years from now. Until then, the United States will purchase flights on board Russia's Soyuz system for its astronaut corps.
NASA is dreaming up missions beyond low-Earth orbit, however, and awaiting Apollo-era-like clarity from the president.
"I think we as a species need to be thinking about living off this planet long-term, very long-term. We need to learn to live on another body" like the moon, said space shuttle launch director Michael Leinbach in a pre-launch press briefing. "But I'm not the policy-maker, I'm the implementer. I need to be told what to do."
Lisa Grossman contributed to this report.
*Images: Space shuttle Atlantis lifts off Launch Pad 39A for the last time. (Dave Mosher/Wired.com)
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