Launch of STS-135

Space Shuttle Atlantis launches on STS-135, the 135th and final flight of the Space Shuttle program. The four-person crew delivered a year's worth of supplies to the International Space Station, and Atlantis's landing at Kennedy Space Center on July 21, 2011, closed out thirty years of Shuttle operations and left the United States without its own means of launching astronauts until commercial crew vehicles began flying nearly a decade later.