The last launch of the space shuttle program happened 10 years ago on July 8, 2011 when Space Shuttle Atlantis took off on STS-135 sending four people into space.
Ten years ago, Pilot Doug Hurley had just joined Twitter, only posting three items before the July 8 launch, including his July 7, 2011 tweet that read, “Heading to bed soon. Hoping for good weather tomorrow!”
There was good weather and Atlantis lifted off from Launch Pad 39-A at 11:29 a.m. EDT with Hurley as well as Christopher Ferguson, Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim on the 135th mission of the space shuttle program.
The shuttle would return to Kennedy July 21 to end more than 30 years of launches by it and sister orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery and Endeavour.
Hurley said of the final touchdown, “The end of an era. … shuttle Atlantis came to a final stop. What a bittersweet day.”
It was just shy of nine years later that Hurley would return to the ISS as one of two passengers along with Bob Behnken on the SpaceX Crew Dragon mission Demo-2, marking the first launch to the ISS from U.S. soil since Atlantis’ last flight.
Atlantis flew its first mission blasting off from KSC on Oct. 3, 1985 on STS-51-J. It flew 33 missions including the final one traveling nearly 126 million miles, according to NASA.
It deployed the Magellan probe to Venus and Galileo probe to Jupiter, made the final Hubble service mission, docked with Russian space station Mir seven times and the ISS 12 times.
Space Shuttle Atlantis is now on display at Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex.
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