When the orbiter Atlantis touched down at the Kennedy Space Center early on the morning of July 21, 2011, it signaled the end of the 30-year run of NASA’s space shuttle program.

One of the four astronauts who will go down in history as a member of the final shuttle crew was Sandra Magnus, PhD CerE 96. Magnus, one of 14 Tech alumni to serve as a NASA astronaut, had been on two previous shuttle missions and spent four and a half months aboard the International Space Station in 2008 and 2009. Last fall, during a campus visit to speak to the Student Alumni Association, Magnus sat with the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine and described the experience aboard the final shuttle mission.

August 2010—Magnus is working at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

I got a call about the end of August, when chief of the office Peggy Whitson asked me if I wanted to be considered for the last shuttle flight, and I was very surprised. She told me that she was curious if I was interested in a short-term mission or wanted to stay in the long duration line. My answer to her was, “Use me where you need to use me.” She called me back about two and a half weeks later and said she’d assigned me to the STS-135 mission.

We were not sure if the mission was going to be executed or not. We were the rescue mission for the shuttle in front of us. Every mission after Columbia, you served as the rescue team for the shuttle in front of you. We were going to be training for the rescue mission, so there was a lot of hope we would be added to the manifest as a normal flight in order to do this logistics delivery.

I think we all started to get comfortable in the February to March time frame that we really were going to go and this was going to be a mission. We had to approach it as if it was 100 percent going to be a mission. You had to learn the things you had to learn: “This mission is going, and I need to learn this now.”

I’ve been an astronaut for 15 years, and I’ve been on three missions. So five years of that time was taken up by training. It’s the hardest thing. Sometimes you forget you’re doing it because it’s fun.

We were a four-person crew. [The other crew members were commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialist Rex Walheim.] A shuttle crew normally consists of six or seven, especially for these very busy station flights. So we had to change how we train. Normally you can split the crew up into a small series of specialists, and each person becomes an expert in that one area with maybe one person backing you up. It reminded me of training for the space station with just four of us, because you had to be a jack-of-all-trades. We had a lot more to absorb. We had extra space station material to absorb because the rescue scenario involved us staying on the space station for up to a year, coming home one by one on a [Russian] Soyuz craft. And we had a shorter time to do it.

The other thing that was quite difficult was saying goodbye to all these people that you’ve worked with for decades. People who just are outstanding, wonderful, dedicated, passionate space employees. Having to say goodbye to them was hard.

We were approaching the end of the shuttle mission whether we flew or not. We were the last crew to do a lot of things. That came up frequently: “This is the last time we’re going to use this simulator. This is the last time we’re going to be in this building.” In addition to that, we had people who were getting laid off as we were going through these milestones—these people were no longer needed.

For example, the crew interface and equipment test in Florida—we visit with the vehicle and the processing facility and we get an introduction to the equipment we’re going to be working with inside the orbiter, and all of the Florida team supports that. The day after we were finished, a couple hundred of them got laid off.

The media attention really started after the 134 mission launched. It was like a huge set of binoculars found us. We did some interaction with the media that’s not typically done. They came and followed us through our training. There was a lot of difference in the last few months, in April and May.

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