Plan B Forum

The museum-bound Endeavour, the youngest of the shuttles, logged nearly 123 million miles over 25 spaceflights.

Atlantis will remain at Kennedy Space Center as a tourist stop, following one last supply run to the space station. Liftoff is set for July 8.

Discovery, the fleet leader, returned from its final voyage in March. Its next stop is a Smithsonian Institution hangar outside Washington.

NASA is leaving the Earth-to-orbit business behind to focus on expeditions to asteroids and Mars. Private companies hope to pick up the slack for cargo and crew hauls to the space station. But it will be a while following Atlantis' upcoming flight -- at least three years, by one business' estimate -- before astronauts ride on American rockets again.

Until then, Americans will continue hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz capsules at the cost of tens of millions of dollars a seat.

keld feldspar wrote:The museum-bound Endeavour, the youngest of the shuttles, logged nearly 123 million miles over 25 spaceflights.