CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Riding a column of flame and smoke, space shuttle Atlantis glided skyward at 9:29 a.m. MDT Friday, the roar of its rockets building to a ground-shaking rumble as cheers erupted at the Kennedy Space Center’s storied countdown clock.
Carrying the burden of history, Atlantis pierced the low cloud deck that threatened to scrub this final space shuttle launch, its tail glow lighting a ring beneath the clouds as the craft slipped ever higher.
Eight and a half minutes later, Atlantis cut its main engines for the last time.
Only then did NASA Administrator Charles Bolden let the finality sink in.
“The three of us kind of looked at each other and realized this was it,” said Bolden, who shared the moment with two compatriots in space flight.
A short time later, launch director Michael Leinbach, another shuttle veteran, appeared at a news conference ruddy- faced, tie loosened, a white-and-blue Atlantis flag flying on his shirt pocket. He said the shuttle launch team lingered in the control room. Their jobs as stewards of the shuttle were finished.
“It’s like a party you don’t want to leave,” he said.
For Mike Moses, a shuttle launch manager since 2008, time warped.
“It hit slow motion there for about 10 seconds,” he said of Atlantis. “It was very moving, very beautiful.”
The team had been a little lucky. Threatening skies cleared two hours before launch, then held long enough to squeeze the shuttle off the pad.
Next big rocket still up in air
The last shuttle carried only four astronauts: commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim. It is the smallest crew since 1983. The reason is another mark of finality: There is no backup shuttle.
For every launch since the Columbia disaster in 2003, NASA has prepped a reserve shuttle for rescue duty. Atlantis had been designated for such duty for the last flight of shuttle Endeavour before Congress funded another full mission.
After the 12-day mission of Atlantis ends July 20 — the 42nd anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing — NASA will be without a means to shoot people into space for the first time since 1981.
If not for its status as the final flight, this mundane supply run to the international space station would have drawn little attention. Atlantis will bring up 8,200 pounds of gear to the six-person outpost, install a robotic satellite refueling experiment on the space station, and haul down trash and a broken ammonia pump.
But space flight is never routine, as the restless gyrations of the morning made evident. NASA weather officers kept a close eye on a low cloud deck and rain clouds to the north of Launch Pad 39A.
Before giving the go-ahead, NASA waived one of its weather criteria: a cloudless sky near the Kennedy Space Center emergency landing strip.
“Clear to launch Atlantis,” word came down, and the countdown clock — held, as usual, at T-minus nine minutes — rolled.
Soon after, the billowing column of launchpad vapor had barely cleared before NASA officials faced reporters with a round of: What next?
“There’s not going to be the void in the sense of what we do in space,” said Bolden, who in 1992 became the first African-American shuttle commander. His ship? Atlantis, named for a research ship.
Bolden pointed to American astronauts set to inhabit another scientific frontier, the international space station, for the next decade. “What we need to do is go on and develop a heavy-lift vehicle,” he said.
That’s a big rocket designed to hoist a capsule beyond Earth’s orbit. It’s a project that Congress, led by members in rocket-making districts, forced on the agency in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act.
Bolden said NASA is set to announce a final design for the new rocket “in the next several weeks.”
One thing is certain: Given congressional constraints, the rocket will incorporate elements of the shuttle — most likely the side-strapping solid rocket boosters — and the now-dead Constellation program, which President George W. Bush began in 2004 to send Americans back to the moon.
“When we finally make a decision, you will see we have a vehicle that complies with Congress and is technically the best vehicle we can build with the budget we’ve been given,” Bolden said.
Plans wait on budget
That budget is under attack. On the eve of the valedictory flight of Atlantis, House Republicans threatened to cut $1.6 billion from NASA’s 2012 funding and cancel the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope, an over-budget and behind-schedule follow-on to the hugely successful Hubble Space Telescope.
Bolden said that such a cut would lengthen the time before U.S. rockets launched Americans into space again.
“It concerns me. It would stretch everything out,” he said.
After the launch, President Barack Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, was peppered with questions about the future of NASA.
“The fact is, the president has laid out an ambitious agenda, an ambitious vision for human space life that will take American astronauts beyond where we’ve been ever before, with the ultimate goal being a human mission to Mars,” Carney said.
Asked why humans should fly into space, Bolden on Friday instead pointed to ancillary benefits of the space program, such as self-contained water purification systems and heart monitors. But his troops are pushing a vision — one of private companies, largely funded by NASA, delivering astronauts to Earth’s orbit even as NASA focuses on deep-space missions, possibly to asteroids.
Private venture steps up
With about 2,600 journalists converging on the Florida launch site this week, the PR push was in full bloom. Near the press center, a new NASA capsule, looking much like the Apollo vehicles of the 1960s and ’70s, served as Exhibit A for the ambitions.
“It will absolutely fly,” said Wayne Hicks, a NASA engineer on the capsule, once dubbed Orion and now called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle.
But the vehicle’s timeline and mission remain uncertain. At a news briefing, vehicle program manager Mark Geyer could not pinpoint when unmanned test flights might occur.
A second capsule, called Dragon and built by the fast-charging company SpaceX, orbited Earth twice in a test last year. On Friday, before Atlantis lifted off, former NASA astronaut and current SpaceX employee Garrett Reisman said he feels “a huge burden of responsibility” to deliver a manned Dragon vehicle to orbit.
Gesturing toward Launch Pad 39A, he said: “I don’t want this to be the last American rocket to carry people into space for a long, long time. If we fail, it could.”
