14 DAY TRIAL // Just one day after the space shuttle Discovery successfully landed at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in Florida, engineers at NASA rolled out Atlantis to its KSC launch pad, in preparations of the orbiter's last planned mission. The transfer maneuver saw the spacecraft being moved atop the Crawler-Transport vehicle starting at 11:31 pm EDT (0431 GMT) Wednesday night. The roll-out maneuver ended 6 hours and 32 minutes later, at 6:03 am EDT (1103 GMT) Thursday morning. According to the NASA flight manifest, this is the last such drive for Atlantis.
“One of my favorite shots, almost as fantastic as launch, is coming out here in the middle of the night, watching it clear the VAB [Vehicle Assembly Building] doors. When it moves out into the xenon lights and they're shining on it, there's just something very special about that. The beginning of this journey into space, it all starts when the whole stack rolls out,” told collectSpace Bob Cabana, who is a former astronaut, and the current director of the KSC. The orbiter is scheduled to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 14.
The primary payloads it will carry will be the Russian-built Rassvet Mini-Research Module, and the Integrated Cargo Carrier-Vertical Light Deployable (ICC-VLD). The new flight, designated STS-132, also represents the orbiter's 32nd spaceflight. Though the shuttles were originally designed to fly considerably more missions each, concerns about their safety have forced NASA to propose their retirement towards the end of this year, in September. After Atlantis flies this mission, Endeavor and Discovery are scheduled to fly to the ISS one more time each.
“There has been a lot of talk from the administration about whether you go ahead and fly that rescue vehicle since you have the hardware […] but there has been no decision made there and from a planning purpose standpoint we're still planning on STS-132 being the last flight of Atlantis,” said a few days ago Mike Moses, who is the space shuttle launch integration manager at NASA. There has been talk that Atlantis will be used as a possible rescue ship for the last planned shuttle mission ever, that of Discovery. But nothing has been established up to this point.
“We've come up with a tagline. This is the first last flight of Atlantis,” said at the launch pad the Commander of the STS-132 mission, NASA astronaut Ken Ham.