The last flight of Shuttle Atlantis

The Shuttle Atlantis launched today on the STS-132 mission.
If you've read some of my previous Shuttle posts (here and here) or if you are following the Shuttle program, you'll now that this is the last flight of the Atlantis. When it lands, it will be decommissioned.
Endeavour and Discovery will have their final flights later this year.

You can see the launch here on youtube


This is truly an end of an era. The shuttles have been in service since the 80's and have given us so much. And now it's all coming to an end. In a couple of weeks when Atlantis comes back down, it will never fly into space again (unless an emergency comes up). How sad is that..

But hopefully we'll get a replacement at some point, something cheap and easily serviceable, so we can send lots of astronauts and more equipment into orbit around the Earth.


I'll sign off again now, I'm very busy writing my Master's Thesis and this was just a quick update on an important subject :)