Desert Falcon's Archives
With the successful landing of the space shuttle Endeavour, the International Space Station is on the verge of completion after $100 billion and 11 years of construction. NASA plans just four more missions to wrap up its few remaining station deliveries.
For Endeavour, in particular, Sunday's shuttle landing marked the beginning of the end. The spacecraft is the youngest of NASA's three aging space shuttles and engineers quickly began working to prepare it to launch one final spaceflight in July.
"We'll go into that with our heads held high," shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach said after the landing. "It's a little bit [of a] sad note, but a great ending to a great mission and we're looking forward to the next one."
Endeavour's 14-day mission delivered a seven-window observation deck and a new room to the International Space Station.
With the new additions — NASA's final major pieces for the space station — the orbiting laboratory is 98 percent complete.
NASA plans to retire its three space shuttles – Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour – by the end of September. After that, American astronauts will have to hitch rides to the space station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
