NASA

By ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES And ROBERT LEE HOTZ

Associated Press

The space shuttle Atlantis lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—The Space shuttle Atlantis arced gracefully into the sky Friday on the final journey of a storied NASA program that, in triumph and tragedy, dominated space travel for a generation.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis launched into space from Cape Canaveral on Friday. It marks the final launch in the program's 30-year history. Former Shuttle commander Ken Bowersox joins the panel to discuss the launch and the program's rich history.

Behind, it left regrets, recriminations, and a space agency facing waning congressional support for future U.S. human spaceflight.

Settling safely into orbit, its crew of four astronauts prepared to dock with the International Space Station and, during a 12-day mission, unload spare parts, air and food for the orbital multinational laboratory. But space analysts and National Aeronautics and Space Administration historians were already writing the epitaph for the $209.1 billion shuttle program.

"It was a magnificent failure," said Duke University space historian Alex Roland. "It was the most technologically sophisticated launch vehicle ever, but it never made human spaceflight safe, reliable and economical."

In 30 years of operation, though, NASA's reusable space shuttles transformed the engineering of spaceflight, experts said. Most importantly, the shuttle program proved that people could perform useful work in space.

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John Raoux/Associated Press

The space shuttle Atlantis astronauts waved on their way to the launch pad Friday morning.

During 135 missions, shuttle astronauts outdid themselves as the space-suited stevedores of low Earth orbit, deploying and retrieving satellites like huge, weightless toys. Working in orbit outside the shuttle, they repeatedly repaired and refurbished the Hubble Space Telescope, unfurled massive solar-power arrays and bolted together the bulky components of the $100 billion space station.

"The space shuttle really allowed us to incorporate low Earth orbit into our normal sphere of activities," said Roger Launius, a space historian at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "It made working up there look not so hard."

The shuttles' activities encompassed the ridiculous and the sublime. The winged spacecraft carried aloft interplanetary probes and observatories that opened new eyes onto the cosmos. But they also carried the home plate of the New York Mets baseball team, play sets of Lego blocks, zero-gravity soft-drink cans and the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

Changing the culture of space travel, it broadened the range of people who were allowed to fly into orbit, from a cadre of military test pilots to include scientists, engineers, schoolteachers and even a politician or two.

The first U.S. woman astronaut, Sally Ride, and the first African-American astronaut, Guion Bluford, were among its early crews. Ellison Onizuka, the first Japanese-American astronaut, perished aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Indian-American astronaut Kalpana Chawla was one of seven people killed aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.

 

The End of the Space Race

4:06

The launch of the last space shuttle this month leaves our long-time Russian rivals a winner by default in the decades-old space race. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports on the end of an epic era.

For all its accomplishments, the shuttle program failed to make spaceflight affordable, critics said. On average, each shuttle launch cost $1.5 billion—100 times more than its designers promised in 1972. In its busiest year, the shuttle fleet could manage nine launches, well short of the annual launch rate of 50 flights that NASA had envisioned.

Despite the celebratory mood surrounding Friday's launch, NASA faces major political and budgetary hurdles in Washington. There is growing bipartisan criticism on Capitol Hill of the agency's leadership, prompted by nagging disputes over the design of next-generation crew capsules and heavy-lift rockets.

With the retirement of its shuttles, NASA plans to rely on Russia to transport American astronauts and cargo to the space station until 2016 or so. After that, U.S. commercial space-taxis are slated to take over the job.

The Obama administration and NASA chief Charles Bolden continue to push for development of in-orbit fuel depots and new liquid-fueled rocket engines. By contrast, congressional leaders want to leverage earlier NASA investments—and reduce job losses in many districts—by relying on solid-propellant boosters derived from the vintage shuttle fleet. Potential destinations after 2020 include landing on asteroids, but details remain in flux and some factions in Congress and NASA prefer first returning to the moon.

But there is still no consensus on what technology and manned missions NASA will focus on beyond the space station, particularly to probe deeper into the solar system.

The Numbers Guy

• Shuttle Price Tag Is Elusive

As a result, many experts fear there could be a stalemate, in which NASA tries to keep open a variety of options but ends up without adequate funds to aggressively pursue any of them.

Like an aging diva making a farewell bow, the Atlantis—which has orbited the planet more than 4,600 times since its maiden flight in 1985—offered the spectators crowding the shorelines of Cape Canaveral early Friday a moment of drama in the seconds before its lift-off.

As the countdown reached 31 seconds to blastoff, an indicator failed to confirm that a piece of launch-pad equipment had fully retracted, and the countdown was frozen. Groans of disappointment emanated from the crowd. Then, at 11:29 a.m., Atlantis took off amid euphoric cheers.

"It was truly an awesome, spectacular launch," said Bob Cabana, Kennedy Space Center director, at a post-launch briefing.

The moment was fraught with emotion for those who have spent much of their careers on the shuttle program. After the liftoff, "it did take a while to leave the control room," said launch director Mike Leinbach. "It was like the end of a party, and you just don't want to go."

—Andy Pasztor contributed to this article