With two words, it all came to an end.
That's the way it is for so many good stories, really. Every "once upon a time" eventually comes around to two words -- "The End."
For this particular story, once upon a time was April 12, 1981, the day that the space shuttle program truly took off with the launch of Columbia on its STS-1 mission.
"The end," on the other hand, came a year this week, on July 21, and the two words that brought it all to a close were "Wheels stop."
When the space shuttle left Earth, it was a rocket. But when it came home, it was an aircraft. For the general public, the former was far more interesting -- the magnificent brilliance of its incredible power as it burned its way through the Florida sky into space. But for many of the former test pilots who became the astronauts that flew the shuttle, the latter aspect was the more compelling. For men who prided themselves on flying their airplanes faster, higher and harder than other pilots, the space shuttle was the ultimate -- it started its air flight at the top of the atmosphere, slowing from a Mach 25 matched by no other aircraft.
And just as the shuttle re-entered as an aircraft, it landed like an airplane, with landing gear -- wheels -- on a runway. And when the commander informed Mission Control that those wheels had stopped moving, the mission was over.
Each of the three remaining orbiters had its final launch in 2011. Each marked its final return to Earth. Each had its commander say for the last time, "Wheels stop." And when they did, ground crews came out and marked the spot where the nose wheels stood, so that markers could forever preserve on the space shuttle landing facility the ending points of the final missions of the three orbiters.
When Commander Chris Ferguson called "Wheels stop" for Atlantis a year ago, he did far more than just ending the STS-135 mission, or even just marking the end of Atlantis' active lifespan. His call back to Mission Control marked the end, after three decades, of the space shuttle program. There was still work to be done; the orbiters stayed online for a few more months before being powered down permanently to be transported to museums. But the flights were over. The space shuttle's tires were certainly not one of the more famous parts of the vehicle, but for that one moment at least, they were the most important, responsible for bringing closure to a story started by the fire of the solid rocket boosters 30 years earlier.
The U.S. Space & Rocket Center's collection of shuttle artifacts includes, among many other things, just such a tire. And that collection will soon be growing even larger. The end of the space shuttle program means that many items that were once accessible only to astronauts and engineers will now become museum displays. Work is already underway at the center on new displays capturing the history of the space shuttle era, and even more are yet to come.
While the end of Atlantis' mission a year ago was a bittersweet moment for human space exploration, it will ultimately lead to even more reasons why the U.S. Space & Rocket Center is a great place for your wheels to stop.
David Hitt, Contributing Author
