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Nasa employees turn out in darkness to welcome the space shuttle home after 126 million miles travelled The shuttle Atlantis has touched down at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida for the last time, lowering the curtain on one of the most eventful eras in America’s long history of human spaceflight. The craft’s pre-dawn landing at the remote airstrip in the north of the space centre was a timid affair compared with the grand spectacle of its final launch 13 days ago , which attracted 1m visitors eager to witness a piece of history. But wheels-stop on the 135th and final mission of the 30-year space shuttle programme was no less significant, nor emotional as scores of Nasa employees turned out in the darkness to welcome the spaceship home for the last time – and mourn the end of a half-century of US dominance in space . Atlantis and its crew of four touched down at 5.56am (10.56am BST) on Thursday after a 5 million-mile mission to resupply the International Space Station, which must now be serviced by Russian spacecraft after the retirement of the three-strong shuttle fleet. “Having fired the imagination of a generation, a ship like no other, its place in history secured, the space shuttle pulls into port for the last time, its voyage at an end,” announced Rob Navias, the voice of mission control. Chris Ferguson, the last astronaut to command Atlantis, was also emotional. “Houston, Mission Complete. After serving the world for 30 years the space shuttle has earned its place in history and it’s come to a final stop,” he said. Before the landing, he also had warm words for the space centre workers, up to 10,000 of whom received redundancy notices coinciding with the end of the shuttle era. “We’ve had great teams all taking care of the shuttle programme for goodness knows how many years. We appreciate every one of their efforts, and they’re all with us in spirit today,” he said in a farewell message from space. “It’s been an incredible ride. We’re going go beyond again someday, hopefully in the not too distant future. We’re going to go back to the moon and to Mars, and the future is very bright. But for now it’s a little sad because we’re saying goodbye to an old friend.” Nasa’s retired shuttles are to go on public display . Atlantis, which travelled almost 126m miles in its 33 flights since its first launch in October 1985, will be relocated to Kennedy Space Centre’s visitor centre after a lengthy decommissioning process. Endeavour, which completed its final flight on 1 June, is heading for the California Science Museum in Los Angeles and Discovery, last flown in March, will replace the non-orbiting shuttle prototype Enterprise at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Nasa’s two other shuttles, Challenger and Columbia, were destroyed in-flight during missions in 1986 and 2003 respectively, each disaster costing seven astronauts their lives. The retirement of the shuttles leaves Nasa with no human launch capability of its own for the first time in the agency’s 53-year history. President Obama cancelled the planned next-generation Constellation programme of spacecraft and rockets on cost grounds, leaving American astronauts to buy seats to the International Space Station, at up to $63m (£40m) a time, on ageing Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft . Private companies including SpaceX , Lockheed Martin and Sierra Nevada have won Nasa contracts to develop spacecraft to compete for such lower Earth orbit duties while the agency is charged with designing, but not yet building, a new heavy-lift rocket that might eventually take astronauts back to the moon for the first time since 1972. But critics fear that the end of the shuttle era, coupled with plans announced in the US Congress this month to slash Nasa’s budget by $1.9bn, and delays by the Obama administration in approving plans to build the rocket, the so-called Space Launch System (SLS), leaves the US looking backwards. “In my opinion, Nasa’s SLS programme is stalled because the White House doesn’t really want to do it,” Mike Griffin, a former administrator of the space agency, told the Huntsville Times , where Nasa rockets are built at the Marshall Space Flight Centre. “They will do everything possible to prevent it from occurring.” Final space shuttle mission The space shuttle Nasa Space United States Florida Richard Luscombe guardian.co.uk