ĭuring an address at the Marshall Space Flight Center on November 16, 2010, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that the agency needed to fly STS-135 to the station in 2011 due to possible delays in the development of commercial rockets and spacecraft designed to transport cargo to the ISS. Until this point, there had been no official references to the STS-135 mission in NASA documentation for the general public. On February 13, 2011, program managers told their workforce that STS-135 would fly regardless of the funding situation via a continuing resolution. This allowed for training and other mission specific preparations. On January 20, 2011, program managers changed STS-335 to STS-135 on the flight manifest. Īlthough the mission was authorized, it initially had no appropriation in the NASA budget, raising questions about whether the mission would fly. The flight of Raffaello marked the only time that Atlantis carried an MPLM. The mission's primary cargo was the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM) Raffaello and a Lightweight Multi-Purpose Carrier (LMC), which were delivered to the International Space Station (ISS). The four-person crew was the smallest of any shuttle mission since STS-6 in April 1983. STS-135 launched on July 8, 2011, and landed on July 21, 2011, following a one-day mission extension. It used the orbiter Atlantis and hardware originally processed for the STS-335 contingency mission, which was not flown. STS-135 ( ISS assembly flight ULF7) was the 135th and final mission of the American Space Shuttle program.
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