Atlantis Shuttle

The Atlantis Shuttle, officially designated OV-104, is one of three operational orbiter vehicles, or space shuttles. Atlantis was the fourth vehicle built and was delivered to NASA in April of 1985. The other two operational vehicles are the Discovery and the Endeavour. The Atlantis will continue to fly throughout 2010, but will retire at the end of the year, marking the end of the space shuttle program. If budget issues are not resolved, it could be the beginning of a sad hiatus in American space travel.

Construction began on the Atlantis shuttle in March, 1980 and was completed by April, 1984. It took another year for final testing and delivery to take place. It was an additional five months before NASA initiated Flight Readiness Firing. The Atlantis flew two missions before the Challenger disaster temporarily grounded the entire program. In 1989, the Atlantis deployed two important planetary probes: the Magellan and the Galileo. In 1991 the Atlantis delivered the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory to space. Shortly after that, the space shuttle began a series of important flights to supply the International Space Station(formerly the Russian space station, Mir). Throughout these flights the Atlantis has continued to deliver key components and fresh crew for the space station. The shuttle has also been used to maintenance the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA had planned to withdraw Atlantis from service in 2008, as the orbiter would have been due to undergo its third scheduled Orbiter maintenance Down Period (OMDP). Because of the final retirement of the shuttle fleet in 2010, this was deemed uneconomic. It was decided that Atlantis would be kept in near flight condition to be used as a parts hulk for Discovery and Endeavour; however, with the significant planned flight schedule up to 2010, the decision was taken to extend the time between OMDPs, allowing Atlantis to be retained for operations. Atlantis has been swapped for one flight of each Discovery and Endeavour in the current flight manifest. Atlantis is now projected to fly at least one more mission prior to the end of the shuttle program.

The Atlantis shuttle now faces aging and decommission, but still represents a significant threshold in the American space program. Here is a good article about the Atlantis. Here on Universe Today we have a great article about Atlantis’s most recent mission. Astronomy Cast offers a good episode about the Constellation program that was going to replace the space shuttle fleet until budget issues grounded it.

Source: NASA

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