Remembering STS-135: Marking One Decade Since the Last Space Shuttle Mission Took Flight...

NASA / Bill Ingalls

It was on this day back in 2011 that Atlantis took off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida...beginning mission STS-135 to the International Space Station (ISS) that lasted 8 days, 15 hours and 21 minutes, and successfully concluded the 30-year space shuttle program. 10 years later, this anniversary is marked by privately-made capsules (SpaceX's Crew Dragon and soon, Boeing's Starliner) transporting astronauts to the ISS, two super heavy-lift rockets—NASA's Space Launch System and SpaceX's Starship vehicles—that will return crew to the lunar surface via the Artemis program within the next five years, and other commercial companies such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic now on the verge of sending paying passengers into space using their suborbital New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo vehicles, respectively.

The time period between 2011 and 2020 (when SpaceX's Demo-2 flight resumed crewed launches from U.S. soil for the first time since STS-135) was marked by delays and uncertainty in America's human spaceflight program, but this new decade should end with mankind moving ever so closer to maintaining a sustainable presence at the Moon, and finally, sending humanity on a much-awaited voyage to Mars. The future of space exploration has never been more promising than this!