Atlantis lifted off at 11:29 a.m. from Kennedy Space Center on STS-135, the 135th and final mission of NASA's Space Shuttle program. The four-person crew delivered supplies to the International Space Station, closing out three decades of shuttle flights that had carried astronauts, satellites, and station modules into orbit since 1981.
Roughly a million spectators lined the Florida coast to watch, despite morning storm clouds that threatened a scrub. Commander Chris Ferguson led a crew of just four — Doug Hurley, Sandra Magnus, and Rex Walheim — the smallest shuttle crew since the program's earliest flights, chosen deliberately since no other shuttle stood ready to rescue them if something went wrong.
The flight carried the Raffaello cargo module packed with a year's worth of supplies for the International Space Station, a hedge against the uncertain gap in resupply capability that would follow the shuttle fleet's retirement. Ferguson left a small American flag aboard the station, one that had flown on the very first shuttle mission in 1981, to be retrieved by whichever nation's spacecraft next launched Americans into orbit from American soil.
Atlantis landed on July 21, 2011, ending the program at a cumulative cost estimated near $200 billion and a legacy that included the Hubble Space Telescope's deployment and repair, station construction, and two fatal disasters, Challenger and Columbia. For nearly a decade afterward, American astronauts rode Russian Soyuz rockets to reach orbit, until SpaceX's Crew Dragon finally restored domestic launch capability in 2020.