Space Shuttle Endeavor to Retire

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The space shuttles are arguably some of the most successful aircraft in history, let alone most successful spacecraft. Their unique ability to glide from the very top of the atmosphere and land on a conventional runway qualifies them as aircraft, while, of course, their ability to orbit the planet makes them spacecraft as well.

Endeavor (officially designated OV-105) has done a masterful job of transferring goods and people from earth to the International Space Station and back. She shows well over 116 million miles on the odometer, and has orbited the Earth over 4,423 times. She’s docked with the Russian space station Mir once and with the International Space Station 11 times.


Her last ride starts on Friday, April 29. If all goes well she’ll roar into space just before four in the afternoon, local time, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. She’ll be delivering spare parts for the ISS and a new experiment, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS).

Instead of a telescope, the AMS is a cosmic ray receiver. The data the AMS captures will be analyzed with the hopes of better understanding the origin of these mysteriously energetic particles, and perhaps gaining insight into the origin of the universe itself.

At the conclusion of this mission, officially dubbed STS-134, Endeavor will head back to the hanger, but the keys won’t be put in the drawer just yet. She’ll be prepped as a backup for STS-135, the Atlantis mission scheduled for June. Endeavor will be the lifeboat should something go wrong while Atlantis is in orbit.

When Atlantis returns from her final flight, Endeavor will be cleaned up and prepped for her longest mission, the last of her life. She’ll be flown out to California and become a permanent museum exhibit at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

Although she won’t be ferrying astronauts or cargo she’ll be doing a far more important job. She’ll be educating the American public on just how magnificent an achievement the space shuttle program was.

Before we get teary-eyed over the end of the shuttle program, however, we must remind ourselves that the Constellation Program is in the building stages. Where the shuttle program did a magnificent job of colonizing Earth’s orbit, Constellation is focused on exploration the solar system and deep space.

You can learn more about Endeavor’s history and STS-134 at NASA’s Shuttles site.
Space Shuttle Endeavor to Retire:
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