NASA’s fourth space-rated shuttle, OV-104 “Atlantis,” was named after the two-masted boat that served as the primary research vessel for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts from 1930 to 1966.

Construction of the orbiter Atlantis began on March 3, 1980.

Thanks to lessons learned in the construction and testing of orbiters Enterprise, Columbia and Challenger, Atlantis was completed in about half the time in man-hours spent on Columbia. Weighing in at 151,315 pounds when it rolled out of the assembly plant in Palmdale, Calif., Atlantis was nearly 3.5 tons lighter than Columbia.

The new orbiter arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 9, 1985, and over the next seven months was prepared for her maiden voyage.

On Oct. 3, 1985, Atlantis launched on her first space flight with a classified payload for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Atlantis also served as the on-orbit launch site for many spacecraft, including planetary probes Magellan and Galileo, as well as the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.

Atlantis pioneered the Shuttle-Mir missions, flying the first seven missions to dock with the Russian space station. When linked, Atlantis and Mir together formed the largest spacecraft in orbit at the time.

The missions to Mir included the first on-orbit U.S. crew exchanges, now a common occurrence on the International Space Station.

In recent years, Atlantis has delivered several components to the International Space Station, including the U.S. laboratory module, Destiny, as well as the Joint Airlock Quest and multiple sections of the Integrated Truss structure that makes up the station’s backbone.

Source: NASA.

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