Shuttle Atlantis Lands Safely After Final Official Mission

saintory writes "Shuttle Atlantis landed this morning after flying its final official mission. In its 25-year service, the shuttle Atlantis has logged over 120 million miles." After a successful mission to deliver a research module to the International Space Station, the craft landed at Kennedy Space Center, and will "go through the normal flow of prelaunch preparations in order to serve as the 'launch-on-need' vehicle for Endeavour's STS-134 mission, the last scheduled flight of the Space Shuttle Program." Congratulations to the people aboard and on the ground who engineered the shuttle's successful return.

Comments

Re:really?

[Binestar]

Atlantis is the "Emergency Rescue" shuttle for the last 2 missions, so it is possible she could fly up and recover astronauts stranded due to tile damage in one of the last 2 missions.

Re:For Sale

[exley]

The cost to pick up one of the shuttles is almost $30 million. They aren't being sold (at this point anyway); that number is allegedly just the cost to clean up the shuttle (removing hazardous materials, etc.), get it display-worthy, and transport it to its final location.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/25/space.shuttles.retirement/index.html

Re:How much of the it is 25yrs old?

[trout007]

I think you might be mistaken about the wire. In 2005 we had a problem with some Kapton insulation so at that time the wiring that could be reached was fully inspected visually. The high wear areas were protected with Teflon and Kapon Tape. We were developing instruments that could detect insulation breaks but that was canceled when the program was scheduled to end in 2010. So now it's just visual inspection of places that we know to be potentially high wear areas.