Atlantis in place as Endeavour returns

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., June 1 (UPI) -- The U.S. space shuttle Atlantis was wheeled to the launch pad at Florida's Kennedy Space Center Wednesday as the shuttle Endeavour completed its final mission.

Endeavour, with six astronauts led by Navy Capt. Mark Kelly, touched down on the shuttle landing strip at 2:35 a.m. EDT, right around the time Atlantis was to reach its launch site.

The Endeavour landing was the 25th nighttime landing of a shuttle.

Atlantis, which has circled Earth more than 4,600 times, traveling more than 120 million miles in space, is expected to add 5 million more miles to its record when it makes the 135th and final mission of NASA's 30-year space shuttle program, set to begin July 8, NASA officials said.

That 12-day mission to the International Space Station will include a four-person crew -- the smallest of any shuttle mission since April 1983.

The commander is to be Christopher Ferguson, a retired U.S. Navy captain who piloted Atlantis on his first mission in September 2006, and Endeavour in November 2008. Other crew members include pilot Douglas Hurley, a U.S. Marine Corps colonel who piloted Endeavour in July 2009, mission specialist Sandra Magnus, an engineer who was part of the Discovery crew in March 2009 after spending 134 days in orbit, and mission specialist Rex Walheim, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who flew Atlantis in April 2002 and again in February 2008.

The crew is to bring cargo to the space station in the large, pressurized multipurpose logistics module Raffaello, named by the Italian Space Agency, which built it, after the Renaissance painter and architect Raffaello Sanzio -- better known as Raphael, who with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, formed the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.

All Atlantis crew members have been custom-fitted for a Russian Sokol spacesuit and molded Soyuz seat liner should they have to return to Earth in a Soyuz capsule in case Atlantis can't make the re-entry and land.

Atlantis emerged, brightly lit, from the massive 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building after sunset Tuesday for the 3.4-mile journey to the Launch Complex 39, the rocket launch site originally built for the 1960s Apollo program and later modified to support shuttle operations.

It traveled to the seaside launch site on top of NASA's crawler-transporters, a pair of tracked vehicles used to transport spacecraft since Apollo days along a 100-foot-wide pathway known as the Crawlerway.

The Crawlerway was designed to support the weight of a Saturn V rocket and payload and was used since 1981 to transport the lighter shuttle to its launchpad.