Final countdown: As nasa prepares to scrap its workhorse, Alex Hannaford of The Telegraph meets the last shuttle pilots and asks: where next?

Jake Stanfill will never forget the day his parents took him down to the beach at Sebastian Inlet, Fla. It was April 12, 1981, and he was 11 years old. Up the coast about 65 kilometres, but clearly visible to the Stanfills and their friends who had gathered on the warm sands and were now looking skyward, the space shuttle Columbia was preparing for liftoff.

It was a clear day and, as a vertical plume of bright white smoke shot heavenward, the young Jake -one of thousands of spectators who witnessed the launch -watched the shuttle roll over on its back and then separate from its boosters. He turned to his parents. "Tears were streaming down their faces with pride," he says. "It was then I realized we were on the cusp of something the world had never seen."

On Tuesday, June 28 -just over 30 years on from that inaugural launch -Chris Ferguson, Rex Walheim, Sandy Magnus and Doug Hurley will suit up and climb into the space shuttle Atlantis bound for the International Space Station. The foursome will make history as the last crew ever to fly a NASA space shuttle mission. The significance of this final flight is not lost on the international space community, or on the astronauts themselves. The spacecraft is, in the words of Sandy Magnus, the only woman on board that final Atlantis mission, "the most unique vehicle that human beings have ever built,"

Columbia's first trip into orbit, which launched the shuttle program, quickly became a symbol of U.S. power and dominance. A statement by then-president Ronald Reagan, read to Columbia's crew, said: "You go forward this morning in a daring enterprise and you take the hopes and prayers of all Americans with you. As you hurtle from Earth in a craft unlike anything ever constructed, you will do so in a feat of American technology and American will."

"Did it blow people's minds? Certainly," says Valerie Neal, a curator of human space history at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.

"It was an awesome achievement -something people took great pride in. This technology held the promise of space flight becoming routine, and simply by looking like an aircraft, it was easy to extrapolate that it could operate like airplanes operate and that some day, ordinary people could go into space as well. In that early '80s flush of optimism, this was the way of the future."

The shuttle program was the result of a decision by then-president Richard Nixon's administration to shut down the Apollo program to reduce federal spending. "People were not impressed with that," says Professor John Logsdon, author of several books about manned space flight and a NASA Advisory Council committee member.



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