PREVIEW: After 30 years, shuttle programme to fly into history

By Anne K Walters Jul 4, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Washington - Just once more. After 134 flights over three decades, the final space shuttle is to light up the sky over Florida's Kennedy Space Centre one last time July 8.

The space shuttle Atlantis' voyage will close the curtains on the space shuttle programme with a 12-day mission to stock up the International Space Station.

The shuttle began its long-career in the 1970s as a successor to the Apollo moon craft and was designed to be the first reusable spacecraft. The maiden flight in April 1981 by astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen aboard shuttle Columbia formally ushered in the new era with a two-day, six-hour mission and 36 orbits of Earth.

Since then, shuttles have flown more than 800 million kilometres - more than the distance between Earth and Jupiter - and brought more than 350 people into orbit, launched crucial satellites, ushered in a new era of cooperation in space and built the International Space Station.

'The space shuttle programme is a second great era in human space flight,' says Valerie Neal, curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

The shuttle began its life as sort of 'space truck' to do practical work ferrying satellites into space, she notes.

'It shifted our direction away from this goal-driven space programme (of reaching the moon) to a more practical kind of space programme,' she said. 'Moving into Earth orbit to learn more about what it is like to live and work there.'

Many of the early shuttle flights focussed on deploying satellites and conducting short-term space experiments in the Spacelab, but the focus since the late 1990s has shifted to constructing the International Space Station.

With the station now complete after more than 10 years of construction, attention is turning at long last to utilizing the station for science with rotating crews of astronauts of varying nationalities. The final mission of the shuttle Endeavour in May delivered the last major component, a physics experiment called the Alpha-Magnetic Spectrometre, that is supposed to provide new clues about the formation of the universe.

'Today the space station is a legacy of the shuttle,' notes Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

The shuttle was meant to make human space flight routine, and to an extent it succeeded - as the general public largely turned away from daily fascination with the space programme.

But two horrific accidents showed in the strongest terms possible that space travel was anything but routine. On January 28, 1986 as many school-children watched teacher Christa McAuliffe and six other astronauts head into space, Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, killing all on board. The accident was blamed on a faulty booster rocket O-ring.

Nearly two decades later, on February 1, 2003 the Columbia disintegrated on reentry into Earth's atmosphere after its heat shield was damaged by loose foam insulation during lift-off. Seven more astronauts died.

That accident led to a reevaluation of the programme and a move to retire it after the space station was completed. In the end, it came down to a lack of money to build a new programme while still operating the shuttle.

Some see the retirement as the death knell of US human space flight.

A group of Apollo astronauts and two early shuttle astronauts along with retired NASA officials sent a letter last week to NASA administrator Charles Bolden urging him to keep the shuttles in working order, saying operating without them created 'an unacceptable flight risk' for the ISS.

Many astronauts of the Apollo generation that flew to the moon have bemoaned the lack of clear focus and achievable goals in the existing plans moving forward.

Eugene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon, told Congress last year that he and some prominent fellow astronauts 'have come to the unanimous conclusion that (Obama's NASA) budget proposal presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to 'nowhere'.'

The Space Policy Institute's Pace agrees, noting that the goal is too far off, leaves little room for international cooperation and does little to answer the question of why humans are in space in the first place.

But NASA insists it is merely a shift of focus.

It is now planning to build a new craft capable of traveling long distances, with the hope of one day making it to Mars or a nearby asteroid. In the meantime, commercial companies are developing craft to take cargo and astronauts into low-Earth orbit and the station.

'Some of my best friends died flying on the shuttle,' Bolden said. 'And I'm not about to let human spaceflight go away on my watch. I'm not going to let it flounder because we pursued a path that we couldn't sustain.'

In the meantime, NASA astronauts will have to hitch expensive rides on Russia's Soyuz craft while commercial craft are developed. Plans are to begin flying cargo on commercial spacecraft before allowing astronauts to fly in such craft.

But while questions remain about the future, eyes are also turned to shuttle's past. And though the flights were never as cheap or as frequent as planned, admirers point to the many advances that make shuttle a success.

'We're not mourning, we're celebrating the great legacy of the shuttle,' says astronaut Rex Walheim, who is among the four final Atlantis crew members.

And as the astronauts make the last flight before the shuttles themselves head to museums, they say the craft will continue to inspire.

'Now for the first time people will be able to go right up to the shuttle and see one in person,' he says, noting now they may say: ''Wow ... let's do it again'.'