CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — For the last time in history, a space shuttle and its crew rose heavenward from NASA's spaceport on Friday, defying gloomy weather and the deeper gloom over the end of a 30-year era of spaceflight.
Atlantis lifted off more than two minutes late, at 11:29 a.m. ET, due to a last-minute glitch involving a camera system that verifies the retraction of a gas-venting arm from the shuttle. The launch team hustled to make sure the arm was indeed out of the way for launch, then restarted the count at T-minus-31 seconds.
The countdown was also marked by weather concerns that continued nearly to the last minute. Mission managers issued a waiver just nine minutes before launch to let the count proceed despite some minor weather constraints.
Once all the last-minute worries were resolved, Atlantis streaked flawlessly into the sky on a pillar of flame and thick clouds. A cheer went up from the legions of spectators who watched the liftoff from Kennedy Space Center.
The tension of the final minutes was balanced by a sense of history. It will be at least three years before U.S. astronauts are once again sent into space on a U.S.-built spaceship. Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson captured the mood in comments made just before launch.
"The shuttle is always going to be a reflection of what a great nation can do when it dares to be bold and commits to follow through," he said. "We're not ending the journey today ... we're completing a chapter of a journey that will never end."
The main objective of this final flight is to build up the International Space Station's stockpile of supplies and spare parts to see it through the next year. After Atlantis lands, NASA is due to prepare the orbiter for museum display, as it is already doing with the fleet's other two spaceships, Discovery and Endeavour.
Hundreds of thousands of spectators surrounded the space center for Friday's program-ending launch. Traffic tie-ups were reported on roads leading to the launch site, and long lines of cars were parked along viewing areas.
Kenneth Cox, 25, an airport employee from Indiana, was part of a group of friends toasting the shuttle with champagne along U.S. 1 in Titusville, Fla. "It's the closing chapter of 30 years," Cox, who went to space camp when he was in the fifth grade, told The Associated Press.
NASA said about 45,000 guests were cleared to watch the liftoff from Kennedy Space Center, in addition to the center's own employees. The VIP list included 14 members of Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder, singers Jimmy Buffett and Gloria Estefan, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Also in attendance were more than 150 Twitter users invited to Kennedy Space Center for a "tweetup," plus Elmo from TV's "Sesame Street."
'We'll give it our best shot'
Atlantis' crew of four astronauts — the smallest shuttle crew since 1983 — were upbeat about the launch after months of preparation. "Put my last pages in my crew notebook," mission specialist Rex Walheim wrote in a Twitter update on the eve of liftoff. "Time for bed. We'll give it our best shot tomorrow!"
The other astronauts taking the last shuttle ride include commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialist Sandy Magnus — all of them veterans. The crew is so small because they'd have to be rescued by Russian Soyuz craft if anything went wrong with Atlantis.
The foursome's main job is to transfer tons of supplies from the Italian-made Raffaello logistics module, riding in Atlantis' cargo bay, into the space station. The extra supplies will keep the space station's crew provisioned through the end of 2012. The astronauts will also drop off an experimental package aimed at testing the capability of refueling satellites robotically, and bring a faulty coolant pump back from the station.
One spacewalk is to be conducted during the 12-day mission, but Atlantis' crew will play only a supporting role for two spacewalkers from the space station's six-person crew.
If the mission proceeds as currently scheduled, Atlantis would land back at Kennedy Space Center on July 20, the 42th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Atlantis would then be readied for display at the space center.
This final mission, known as STS-135, marks the 33rd flight of Atlantis and the 135th flight for the entire shuttle fleet.
"There's an old saying that says it's better to travel well than to arrive," NASA test director Jeff Spaulding said. "And I'd have to say after the last 30 years, certainly our program and these shuttles, throughout all of their missions, have traveled very well. And after 135's landing, I think we can say at that point that we've arrived."
Bittersweet farewell
The retirement of Atlantis and its sister shuttles is in line with a plan drawn up years ago, which called for NASA to stop spending money on shuttle flights so it could concentrate on developing spaceships to go beyond Earth orbit. NASA is aiming to send humans to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 and to Mars and its moons by the mid-2030s.
"We in the government are going to be doing the 'Lewis and Clark' missions," Lori Garver, the agency's deputy administrator, told journalists Thursday.
The job of resupplying the space station, and providing the transport for crew members, would be left at first to spacecraft operated by Russia and NASA's other international partners. Eventually, U.S. commercial spacecraft would help fill the gap. One of NASA's commercial partners, California-based SpaceX, is planning a test cargo run to the space station later this year.
SpaceX and other companies are receiving tens of millions of dollars from NASA to build spaceships capable of carrying astronauts as well as cargo, but those companies say it will take at least three years with adequate funding to put those spacecraft into operation. None of those spaceships will match the shuttle's 25-ton cargo-carrying capacity.
The mood at Kennedy Space Center for the last launch was decidedly bittersweet. Payload manager Joe Delai got emotional as he talked about all the items riding in the shuttle's cargo bay. "It's not a piece of metal, it's a way of life," he said. "It's what we do."
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Retired astronaut Bob Crippen, who flew on the first shuttle mission back in 1981, said he was "proud of what the shuttle has done" over the past 30 years. "But I'm disappointed that we're standing it down without the capability to put our astronauts in orbit ourselves," he told msnbc.com.
Crippen, along with other former astronauts and flight directors, put his name to a letter asking NASA to delay Atlantis' launch for more than a year, restart the production lines for shuttle components and keep the program going. On Thursday, however, Crippen acknowledged that "that boat's already sailed ... I don't believe we're going to turn anything around."
The shuttle workforce has already been reduced in anticipation of the program's end, and thousands are due to be laid off soon after the shuttle lands. Crippen said he was sad that so many people — including his daughter, a shuttle crew trainer — were losing their jobs. "But I'm proud that they've kept their focus," he said, "and that they want to get off this mission and make it as much a success as the first one."
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