Atlantis
On 3rd October 1985, the space shuttle Atlantis, named after an ocean research ship used from 1930-1966, blasted off from Kennedy Space Center on the first of her 32 missions. Her cargo was two Department of Defense communications satellites. At the time, the shuttle was a major means of placing satellites into orbit.
As the newest of the original production run of four shuttles, Atlantis was in near-pristine condition, having flown just two missions, when the fleet was grounded after the loss of Challenger. A damaged o-ring on Atlantis’ second flight less than a year earlier, which left the shuttle and crew within 14 seconds of a similar fate before the booster was jettisoned on schedule, was not given sufficient attention to save the lives of the Challenger crew.
On her third mission, the shuttle encountered another design flaw that would prove fatal for Columbia and her crew. Severe heat shield damage after launch, dismissed by NASA ground engineers as being no worse than usual, convinced Commander Robert L. Gibson that he and his crew were “going to die”. The mission was again for the Department of Defense, meaning that Atlantis’ crew had to encrypt images of the damage that they sent back to Houston. Many sources cite this as causing a degradation in the quality of the images the engineers recieved. Commander Gibson was furious about the response from Houston. If the spacecraft showed signs of disintegrating, he intended to use his final seconds to “tell mission control what I thought of their analysis”. On landing, engineers were astonished at the extent of damage to the shuttle. One tile was completely missing. Fortuitously, it was positioned over a dense aluminium mounting plate for the shuttle’s L-band antenna, possibly preventing the kind of disaster that befell Columbia.
In 1989, on her fourth mission, Atlantis made history when it deployed an interplanetary probe on-orbit, a first for the shuttle program. Magellan went on to map Venus with its on-board radar a year later.
Atlantis launched Galileo later the same year, a probe which forever changed the way scientists view Jupiter. It’s fair to say that Atlantis has made a huge contribution to interplanetary exploration.
Servicing both Mir and the International Space Station, Atlantis final mission was ferrying the Russian Rassvet research module to the ISS.
Atlantis isn’t quite ready to be shipped off to a museum, however. She is currently being prepped to fly one more time, as a contingency.
Since the loss of Columbia, all shuttle missions must have a “rescue shuttle” ready to launch. The idea is that any shuttle that becomes disabled in orbit can reach the safe haven of the ISS. If the shuttle cannot reach the ISS, the ISS can, apparently, approach the shuttle for rendezvous. The disabled shuttle is then jettisoned and an unmanned remote-control landing will be attempted by Houston, while the shuttle crew wait aboard the ISS. With 45 days, the rescue shuttle will have launched to retrieve the stranded crew.
These rescue scenarios have not been necessary in recent years (with one exception) since the ISS has the capacity to host a stranded crew until the next scheduled shuttle mission.
However, since STS-134 will be the final shuttle mission, a special-case rescue mission using Atlantis needed to be planned.
In the very likely event that this rescue mission does not need to be flown, there is some debate about sending up Atlantis anyway as another full shuttle mission. Since NASA will have to pay the considerable costs of processing the orbiter for another flight anyway, and there will be two Russian Soyuz craft available at the station should the orbiter become disabled, the logic behind another mission seems sound.
However, since the loss of Columbia, NASA has been under a mandate to recertify certain shuttle components by 2010. An additional mission could mean a lot of expenditure to bring Atlantis up to the required spec. This was, in fact, a contributing factor in the decision to retire the fleet.
More than likely, she has flown her final mission.
EDIT: Or not!
