When Atlantis returns to Earth in about two weeks, NASA will retire its shuttle program in order to focus on deep-space exploration. Trips to the ISS will shift to a commercial focus, and the orbiters from Enterprise, Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis will be shipped off to various museums throughout the country.
The shuttle era started on April 12, 1981 with Columbia. It was manned by Commander John W. Young and Pilot Robert L. Crippen and lasted two days. The second flight, also aboard Columbia, occurred in November 1981 and there were two dozen successful shuttle launches before the tragic Challenger explosion in 1986. After the disaster, the shuttle program took a two-year break before returning with an all-veteran crew for the September 29, 1988 launch of Discovery.