This week marks 15 years since Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down at Kennedy Space Center, closing out NASA's Space Shuttle programme with the STS-135 mission. The flight, which launched on 8 July 2011 and returned on 21 July, was originally an unplanned rescue mission for the preceding STS-134 flight, but lawmakers and NASA managers instead made it the programme's final outing, flown with a skeleton crew of just four astronauts. The anniversary is a reminder of how NASA's post-Shuttle plans for crewed spaceflight have unfolded rather differently than intended.

STS-135 was commanded by Christopher Ferguson, with Douglas Hurley as pilot alongside mission specialists Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim; both Ferguson and Hurley later became linked to NASA's Commercial Crew Programme, with Hurley flying SpaceX's first crewed Dragon test in 2020. After the Shuttle's retirement, the US relied on Russian Soyuz craft for ISS access until SpaceX restored domestic launches in 2020, with Boeing's troubled Starliner only managing a crewed test in 2024 that ended with an empty return and its crew coming home via SpaceX in 2025. With Boeing's programme still lacking a firm next crewed flight date and SpaceX's Crew Dragon fleet finite and unlikely to be expanded, NASA's hoped-for two-provider redundancy has yet to materialise as planned.