Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) successfully amended the House version of the bill to add an additional shuttle mission to the manifest. On July 22, 2010, during a meeting of the House Science Committee, U.S. ![]() A draft NASA reauthorization bill considered by the House Science & Technology Committee did not provide for an extra shuttle mission. The bill still needed the approval of the full Senate. On July 15, 2010, a Senate committee passed the 2010 NASA reauthorization bill, authored by Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), to direct NASA to fly an extra Space Shuttle mission (STS-135) pending a review of safety concerns. With support from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the fate of STS-135 ultimately depended on whether lawmakers could agree to fund converting the mission from launch-on-need to an actual flight. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Crew of STS-135. The last shuttle mission to fly with just four crew members occurred 28 years earlier: STS-6 on April 4, 1983, aboard Space Shuttle Challenger. It was the only time that a Shuttle crew of four flew to the ISS. The reduced crew size also allowed the mission to maximize the payload carried to the ISS. All STS-135 crew members were custom-fitted for a Russian Sokol space suit and molded Soyuz seat liner for this possibility. If the shuttle was seriously damaged in orbit, the crew would have moved into the International Space Station and returned in Russian Soyuz capsules, one at a time, over the course of a year. Only four astronauts were assigned to this mission, versus the normal six or seven, because there were no other shuttles available for a rescue following the retirement of Discovery and Endeavour. NASA announced the STS-335/135 crew on September 14, 2010. The crew presents President Obama with a NASA flight jacket from the final mission. ![]() Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, salutes the crew during their appearance for a taping of his television show. According to NASA, the budget running through September 30, 2011, ended all concerns about funding the STS-135 mission. The federal budget approved in April 2011 called for US$5.5 billion for NASA's space operations division, including the shuttle and space station programs. United Space Alliance signed a contract extension for the mission, along with STS-134 the contract contained six one-month options with NASA in order to support continuing operations. The mission was included in NASA's 2011 authorization, which was signed into law on October 11, 2010, but funding remained dependent on a subsequent appropriations bill. and that's really needed to the risk for the development time for commercial cargo", Bolden said. "We are hoping to fly a third shuttle mission (in addition to STS-133 and STS-134) in June 2011, what everybody calls the launch-on-need mission. ĭuring an address at the Marshall Space Flight Center on November 16, 2010, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that the agency needed to fly STS-135 to the station in 2011 due to possible delays in the development of commercial rockets and spacecraft designed to transport cargo to the ISS. Until this point, there had been no official references to the STS-135 mission in NASA documentation for the general public. On February 13, 2011, program managers told their workforce that STS-135 would fly regardless of the funding situation via a continuing resolution. ![]() This allowed for training and other mission specific preparations. ![]() On January 20, 2011, program managers changed STS-335 to STS-135 on the flight manifest. Īlthough the mission was authorized, it initially had no appropriation in the NASA budget, raising questions about whether the mission would fly. The flight of Raffaello marked the only time that Atlantis carried an MPLM. The mission's primary cargo was the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM) Raffaello and a Lightweight Multi-Purpose Carrier (LMC), which were delivered to the International Space Station (ISS). The four-person crew was the smallest of any shuttle mission since STS-6 in April 1983. STS-135 launched on July 8, 2011, and landed on July 21, 2011, following a one-day mission extension. It used the orbiter Atlantis and hardware originally processed for the STS-335 contingency mission, which was not flown. STS-135 ( ISS assembly flight ULF7) was the 135th and final mission of the American Space Shuttle program.
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