The Space Shuttle Atlantis is currently scheduled to launch Saturday morning Australian time (1.26am AEST 9 July) on the last mission by a Space Shuttle. The Shuttle fleet is being retired for a number of reasons including lack of safety features in the Shuttle design which can’t be improved and the cost of the flights. In the event of Atlantis being damaged during launch, the Shuttle is carrying a reduced crew for its final mission. This will allow the Shuttle crew to return to Earth using Russian Soyuz spacecraft in this event.
Some Space Shuttle Trivia for you courtesy of NASA
- STS-135 is the 135th and final shuttle mission and the 33rd flight of Atlantis.
- 355 individuals will have flown 852 times on 135 shuttle missions since STS-1 launched on April 12, 1981.
- Sixteen countries have been represented on shuttle missions: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States.
- Fourteen people died during two accidents: STS-51L on Jan. 28, 1986 and STS-107 on Feb. 1, 2003.
- The five orbiters have flown 537,114,016 miles. STS-135 will add more than four million miles to the total.
- More than 2,000 experiments have been conducted on the shuttles in the fields of Earth, biological and ma-terials sciences and astronomy.
- The shuttles have docked to two space stations: Between 1994 and 1998, nine missions flew to the Russian Mir. With STS-135, 37 shuttle missions will have flown to the International Space Station.
- Shuttles have landed at the Kennedy Space Center 77 times, Edwards Air Force Base in California 54 times and the White Sands Test Facility, N.M. once.
- In launch configuration, the space shuttle, external tank, twin solid rocket boosters, and the three space shut-tle main engines contain about 2.5 million moving parts.
