Astronauts make last spacewalk of NASA shuttle era (AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Astronauts making the last spacewalk of NASA's space shuttle era on Tuesday retrieved a broken pump from the International Space Station and installed a fill-er-up experiment for a robot.

The space station's two-armed robot Dextre won't tackle the $22.6 million playset — a fancy Fisher-Price toy as one astronaut describes it — until long after Atlantis departs and the shuttle program ends.

But perhaps more than anything else on this final journey by a shuttle, the robotic demo illustrates the possibilities ahead for NASA: satellite-refueling stations in space run by robots.

In a departure from previous shuttle visits, the spacewalking job fell to space station astronauts, Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr., who teamed up for three spacewalks in 2008. The four-person Atlantis crew is the smallest in decades, and so the lone spacewalk of the mission was handed over to the full-time station residents.

It was the 160th spacewalk in the 12 1/2-year life of the orbiting outpost, and the last one planned for Americans for nearly a year.

Fossum and Garan paused to admire the view 245 miles below — the Kennedy Space Center — before heading to a storage platform holding the old, broken pump.

"Hello Kennedy, beautiful launch," Fossum called out. Atlantis departed Kennedy on Friday on the very last shuttle launch.

They completed the two major chores — the pump removal and robotic test hookup — inside of 3 1/2 hours.

The ammonia coolant pump stopped working last July and, for more than two weeks, left the space station with only half its cooling capability. Space station residents had to perform three emergency spacewalks last summer to replace the pump and restore full cooling to all the on-board equipment.

NASA wants the pump brought back to Earth so engineers can figure out why it failed to help them keep the on-board station pumps running. The space station is intended to operate until at least 2020.

Garan gripped the pump as the space station's robot arm maneuvered him over to Atlantis. The pump was anchored onto a platform in the shuttle's payload bay, ready for next week's ride home.

As they turned their attention to the robotic experiment, the spacewalkers thanked all the thousands of people who worked on the shuttle. "It is really beautiful," Garan said.

The robotic workbench — which the astronauts attached to a shelf on Dextre's base — consists of a 3 1/2-foot box holding four customized tools, including a wire cutter and a safety cap removal device, as well as an assortment of knobs, caps, valves and a half gallon of ethanol.

Dextre — a hulking metal robot with 11-foot arms — will release locks on the tools in August but won't try out the workbench until January.

The designers of the experiment — based at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. — envision robots one day using these methods to fill the fuel tanks of satellites orbiting as high as 22,300 miles. That would keep the spacecraft operating longer, instead of becoming expensive pieces of space junk. What's more, spacecraft bound for distant worlds could fill up after launch, thereby flying more payloads because of the savings in fuel weight.

While the spacewalk unfolded, the majority of the eight astronauts inside worked to unload the nearly 5 tons of supplies that were delivered in a giant cargo carrier by Atlantis. It represents a year's worth of food, clothes and other housekeeping items, to tide the crew over in case commercial rocket makers fall behind in their own cargo runs. The first such haul is supposed to take place by year's end.

Until now, the shuttle has hoisted the bulk of supplies to the space station. Cargo runs by Russia, Japan and Europe will continue.

NASA is turning to private enterprise in the post-shuttle period, so it can meet the White House goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars the decade after that.

The 13-day flight by Atlantis is the last for the 30-year shuttle program. Atlantis is due to return July 21 to Kennedy, where it will go on display at a tourist center.

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NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

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Shuttle lifts off for last time; `Light this fire' (AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Atlantis and four astronauts thundered into orbit Friday on NASA's last space shuttle voyage, writing the final chapter in a 30-year story of dazzling triumphs, shattering tragedy and, ultimately, unfulfilled expectations.

After days of gloomy forecasts full of rain and heavy cloud cover, the spaceship lifted off at 11:29 a.m. — just 2 1/2 minutes late — and embarked on the 135th shuttle mission. The crowd of spectators was estimated at nearly 1 million.

"Let's light this fire one more time," Commander Christopher Ferguson said just before taking flight.

The shuttle was visible for 42 seconds before disappearing into the clouds.

It will be at least three years — possibly five or more — before astronauts are launched again from U.S. soil, and so this final journey of the shuttle era packed in crowds and roused emotions on a scale not seen since the Apollo moon shots. NASA has set of long-term goal of flying to an asteroid and eventually Mars.

"Take a deep breath. Enjoy a little time here with your families again. But we've got a lot of work to do. We've got another program that we've got to get under way," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told the launch control team after Atlantis reached orbit. He added: "We know what we're doing. We know how to get there. We've just got to convince everybody else that we know what we're doing."

Atlantis' crew will deliver a year's worth of critical supplies to the International Space Station and return with as much trash as possible. The spaceship is scheduled to come home on July 20 after 12 days in orbit.

The four experienced space fliers rode Atlantis from the same launch pad used more than a generation ago by the Apollo astronauts. NASA waived its own weather rules in the final minutes of the countdown to allow the launch to go forward. In the end, though, the liftoff was delayed not by the weather but by the need to verify that the launch pad support equipment was retracted all the way.

The last-minute suspense was fitting in a way, since Florida's famously stormy weather delayed numerous shuttle missions almost from the start of the program and was a major reason spaceflight never became routine, as NASA had hoped for.

Spectators jammed Cape Canaveral and surrounding towns for the emotional farewell. Kennedy Space Center itself was packed with shuttle workers, astronauts and 45,000 invited guests.

NASA's original shuttle pilot, Robert Crippen, now 73, was among the VIPs. He flew Columbia, along with Apollo 16 moonwalker John Young, on the inaugural test flight in 1981. Other notables on the guest list: a dozen members of Congress, Cabinet members, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, four Kennedy family members, singers Jimmy Buffett and Gloria Estefan, and two former NASA chiefs.

"I'm a little bit sad about it, and a little bit wistful," said Jennifer Cardwell, 38, who came with her husband, John, and two young sons from Fairhope, Ala. "I've grown up with it."

The space shuttle was conceived even as the moon landings were under way, deemed essential for building a permanent space station. NASA brashly promised 50 flights a year — in other words, routine trips into space — and affordable service.

But the program suffered two tragic accidents that killed 14 astronauts and destroyed two shuttles, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. NASA never managed more than nine flights in a single year. And the total tab was $196 billion, or $1.45 billion a flight.

Yet there have been some indisputable payoffs: The International Space Station would not exist if it were not for the shuttles, and the Hubble Space Telescope, thanks to repeated tuneups by astronauts, would be a blurry eye in the sky instead of the world's finest cosmic photographer.

The station is essentially completed, and thus the shuttle's original purpose accomplished. NASA says it is sacrificing the shuttles because there is not enough money to keep the expensive fleet going if the space agency is to aim for asteroids and Mars.

Thousands of shuttle workers will be laid off within days of Atlantis' return from its 33rd flight, on top of the thousands who already have lost their jobs. And the three remaining shuttles will become museum pieces.

After Atlantis took flight, NASA launch director Mike Leinbach choked up as he thanked the members of his control team, some of whom will be out of a job. "The definition of godspeed I like the best is 'have a prosperous journey,' and folks, from the bottom of my heart, good luck and godspeed," he said.

This day of reckoning has been coming since 2004, a year after the Columbia tragedy, when President George W. Bush announced the retirement of the shuttle and put NASA on a course back to the moon. President Barack Obama canceled the back-to-the-moon program in favor of trips to an asteroid and Mars.

But NASA has yet to work out the details of how it intends to get there, and has not even settled on a spacecraft design.

The space shuttle demonstrates America's leadership in space, and "for us to abandon that in favor of nothing is a mistake of strategic proportions," lamented former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who led the agency from 2005 to 2008.

After Atlantis' lights-out flight, private rocket companies will take over the job of hauling supplies and astronauts to the space station. The first supply run is targeted for later this year, while the first trip with astronauts is projected to be years away.

Until those flights are up and running, American astronauts will be hitching rides to and from the space station via Russian Soyuz capsules, at more than $50 million per trip.

Russia will supply the rescue vessels for Ferguson and his crew if Atlantis ends up severely damaged in flight. But the Russian spaceships can carry only three people, including two crew members, and any rescue would require a series of back-and-forth trips. That is why only four astronauts are flying Atlantis, the smallest crew in decades.

When Atlantis returns, it will be put on display at the Kennedy Space Center. Discovery and Endeavour already are retired and being prepped for museums in suburban Washington and Los Angeles.

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Associated Press writers Mitch Stacy in Titusville, Fla., and Seth Borenstein at Cape Canaveral contributed to this story.

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(This version CORRECTS return date to July 20.)

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Witness: Practice key to risky, high-speed shuttle landing (Reuters)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – I have watched as space shuttles nosedive toward the runway more than 100 times, knowing that there are no engines available to carry them back into the sky if something goes wrong.

When the ships glide home in a quiet countermove to their thunderous liftoff, it is not without drama.

Flawless touchdowns have come to seem routine since the inaugural shuttle flight in April 1981 but they are not a given. Landing safely is an overarching goal as NASA prepares for its final space shuttle mission -- and that is why Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson recently buckled in for his 1,400th or so practice run in a Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA).

I recently was among three reporters invited aboard the modified Gulfstream business jet that was a stand-in in for the shuttle on one of Ferguson's last training runs at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was a rare chance to travel aboard a NASA aircraft, let alone one piloted by shuttle astronauts.

"It's a clean airplane, it likes to glide and it has good thrust," said veteran astronaut Ken Cockrell, who served as Ferguson's instructor. "We have to ruin all that to make it fly like a shuttle."

Our aircraft soared out over the Atlantic Ocean through the calm, moonless sky for Ferguson's first approach. The former TOP GUN Navy pilot was to make nine practice landings for the training run, bringing his STA training tally to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,400 -- plus one actual shuttle landing.

The repetition is necessary because the shuttle drops through the air like a brick due to stubby wings that favor the aerodynamics of launch over landing.

"You don't fly your first (shuttle) flight until you've had 500 (STA) approaches," Cockrell said. "It's a dog-training routine. You do it many, many times until it becomes like the back of your hand."

At about 20,000 feet, I felt a gentle push out of my seat, a tantalizing sample of microgravity like the lift you get at the peak of a roller coaster ride.

Then we plunged toward the ground. The horizon, a thin ribbon of tangerine light left by the setting sun, twisted sideways in my window. Though we were warned about motion sickness, I felt only glee.

Ferguson was heading toward the shuttle's runway, a three-mile (5-km) concrete landing strip ringed by canals in the marshlands around the Kennedy Space Center.

HIGH-SPEED LANDINGS

Though the runway was illuminated by xenon floodlights, they were useless at high altitude. Instead, the pilot relied on other visual cues and navigation aids laid out along two pathways home -- one coming from the southeast, which ends on Runway 33, and one from the northwest to Runway 15. Shuttle pilots practice both approaches.

"It becomes like second nature so that when you become scared you don't have to worry about one part of it, which is how to fly the approach. You know it," Cockrell said.

For the third and fourth practice landings, I moved to the front of the plane and took up what I hoped to be a stable stance for the steep glides to come. To my left, I could see the handle that opens the stairway door, which Cockrell had warned us not to touch.

"It's possible that if you manage to get the door to crack open a little bit, the slipstream is going to pull it open and knock it off or something and you're going to go with it, so don't do that," he said.

Instead, I planted my left hand on the metal frame behind Ferguson's head, stepped my right leg back and bent my knees, praying I would not tumble into the cockpit. Then, the moment of microgravity lifted my whole body.

I managed some peeks through the windows before the rude slap of gravity returned my concentration to balancing.

As we careened toward ground, coming in seven times steeper than a commercial airliner, the runway looked impossibly small and surrealistic, a dollhouse version of real life.

Shuttle landings occur at about 230 miles per hour and it took us less than 30 seconds to reach that point after the STA started to dive.

We hovered over the runway, simulating the exact view that Ferguson will have when he makes the touchdown in the real, taller shuttle. Cockrell then pushed a button to take the plane out of simulation mode, returning the engines to forward thrust, and we swooped back into the sky for another run.

"Everyone remarks that when they get the chance to land the real orbiter, it's like flying the STA only smoother," Cockrell said. "The STA is a lighter airplane and tends to respond to gusts. You have to work harder to fly the path."

To mimic the shuttle, the pilot drops the Gulfstream's landing gear down when the plane is still flying at 288 mph, positions the plane to begin a dive and opens up thrust reversers, which redirect the engine exhaust forward, rather than back, slowing the aircraft.

With the plane now locked in shuttle simulation mode, it's up to the shuttle pilot to glide it back toward the runway.

"It's nothing like a night aircraft carrier landing -- I can tell you that -- but it's a good thrill," Cockrell said.

"It's fairly busy although once you've done it a few hundred times it's fun."

Ferguson and his crew are scheduled to launch Atlantis on July 8 for a 12-day mission at the International Space Station. The flight is the 135th and last in the shuttle program.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Bill Trott)

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