One year (and one day) after launching on NASA’s final space shuttle mission, the orbiter Atlantis is parked today just a few miles from the launch pad where it lifted off on July 8, 2011.

No longer flight-worthy its main engines replaced with replicas and its hazardous fuel lines removed Atlantis is waiting inside a high bay in the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building to complete its transformation into a museum-safe displaylater this year.

This November, NASA plans to roll Atlantis, the last of its space-flown shuttles, down the road to the center’s visitor complex, where a $100 million exhibition hall for Atlantis will open to tourists next summer.

Like Atlantis and some of its parts, so too has dispersed the team that led STS-135, the final flight of NASA’s 30-year shuttle program. A year since working together to fly one last mission to the International Space Station, the astronauts, Mission Control directors, and managers have since moved on to other missions, programs, and in some cases, other organizations.

The final four

Atlantis’ four astronauts commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim stayed together as a crew for four months after flying the 13-day STS-135 missionfrom July 8 to July 21, 2011.

They toured NASA centers, spoke to the public about their mission, visited with President Obama in the White House and then finally, on Nov. 2, posed for photos together with the crew of the first space shuttle mission, STS-1 astronauts John Young and Bob Crippen. [NASA's Last Shuttle Mission in Pictures]

“We’re done,” Ferguson said that day, following the photo shoot. “Everyone goes their separate ways right now.”

For Ferguson, that meant separating from NASA. On Dec. 9, Ferguson announced he was leaving the space agency. He accepted a position with Boeing, overseeing the design and development of the crew systems for their potential shuttle replacement, a capsule the company is calling the Commercial Space Transportation, or CST, 100.

Boeing’s CST-100 is among a small group of commercial spacecraft competing for a NASA contract to fly astronauts to and from the space station. NASA is expected to reveal its choices of vehicles this summer.

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