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Atlantis touches down

30-yr US shuttle era ends

AFP, Cape Canaveral
Atlantis touched down for a final time yesterday, ending its last mission to the International Space Station and bringing down the curtain on NASA's 30-year space shuttle program.
The shuttle and its four-member US crew cruised home to a predawn landing at Kennedy Space Centre at 5:57am local time, closing an era of human space exploration for the United States and leaving Russia as the world's only taxi to the ISS.
"Atlantis is home, its journey complete. A moment in history to be savoured," mission control's commentator in Houston said as the white orbiter, emblazoned with an American flag, rolled to a stop.
"The space shuttle has changed the way we view the world, it has
changed the way we view our universe," Shuttle commander Chris Ferguson said.
Earlier the crew woke to the song "God Bless America," in preparation for the bittersweet end to the storied shutde career, 42 years after US astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to step foot on the Moon as partoftheApollo 11 mission.
The shuttle mission STS-135 comprised a nearly 13-day trip to restock the ISS for a year with several
tons of supplies and food.
Over the course of the program, five NASA shuttles — Atlantis, Challenger, Columbia, Discovery and Endeavour — have comprised a fleet designed as the world's first reusable space vehicles.
Columbia exploded in 2003 and Challenger was destroyed in 1986 in accidents that killed a total of 14 crewmembers.
Those disasters left only three in the space-flying fleet and Enterprise,
a prototype that never flew in space. The quartet will become museum pieces in the coming months.
On Wednesday, Nasa administrator Bolden said the space agency was committed to the goals set out by President Barack Obama to send humans to an asteroid in 2025 and explore Mars by2030.
Nasa is building a Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle that it hopes will be able to reach that goal, while it turns over low-orbit space travel and space station servicing to commercialventures.
A commercial launcher and capsule built by a private corporation in partnership with NASA may be ready to tote crew members as early as 2015.
Until the private sector fills the void left by the shuttle's retirement, the world's astronauts will rely on Russian Soyuz rockets for rides to the ISS.