Mark Kirkman / Interspace News

Msnbc.com's Alan Boyle takes the controls in the commander's seat inside the shuttle motion-base simulator at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

After a decade of trying, I finally landed a space shuttle.

Not the real thing, of course. I'm talking about a simulated landing, basically flown on a computer. Every once in a while, I've tried my hand on the arcade-game-style shuttle simulators you might find at science centers and museums, and it hasn't been pretty. I'd come down to hard, or confuse my "up" and "down" on the joystick, or veer off the landing strip. I've gotten pretty used to flashing red lights and low scores over the years.

So when it came time to go up the stairs and climb into the motion-base shuttle simulator at NASA's Johnson Space Center, the first thing that came to mind was the Astronaut's Prayer: "Dear Lord, please don't let me screw up" (or something like that). The pressure got just a bit worse when our trainer for the session, NASA flight controller Corbett Hoenninger, told our crew of journalists that the folks who rode in the simulator just before us were the Atlantis astronauts themselves.

I climbed into the commander's seat for the initial takeoff. The motion-base simulator is a little bit like the ones you might find at high-class amusement rides — a mockup cockpit that's crammed with real-looking hardware, including a heads-up electronic display on the forward window and a 1980s-vintage seatbelt with five clip belts for the shoulders, waist and crotch.

As I gripped the joystick with my right hand, Hoenninger was reassuring.

"I have faith in you," he said.

"I don't," I answered.

First, we experienced launch. There was really nothing I needed to do, except to roll with the rocking simulator, listen to the recorded rumble and watch the solid-rocket boosters fall away on the computer-generated display out the side window. Then we went right to the landing sequence.

There are lots of gauges and rolling balls that the real astronauts can probably make sense out of, but for me, the key thing was to peer into the heads-up display and use the joystick to keep a small glowing diamond inside a bright circle on the heads-up display. The circle shifts around the screen, to reflect how you should be moving the joystick to make a banking turn and level up the gliding shuttle for final approach to the simulated runway.

I went through a little bit of that up-down problem, but Hoenninger was there to remind me of the difference — and alert me about two little triangles that would start rising up from the bottom of the video display. As the start of the runway grew larger on my display, the triangles served as a guide for moving the joystick so that you landed level instead of falling onto the runway like a brick. The latter alternative is something I'm all too familiar with.

Believe it or not, I actually set our virtual runway on the ground without crashing, although there was an inelegant thump and a screech that sounded off-nominal. Then Hoenninger reminded me about the pedals. The shuttle has two hydraulic pedals that control your wheel braking to keep you on the centerline as you slow the craft to a stop. The system couldn't be simpler, but it still took me a few seconds to get the coasting under control — in part because I let my feet slip off the pedals while I was flying.

After my landing, each of the other three journalists took their turn. All of us set the shuttle down successfully. In fact, Hoenninger told me later that not one of the visiting media types had crashed. That made me feel a little less special. But I did get a "Certificate of Accomplishment" for successfully landing the motion-base shuttle mission simulator, which I'll put in a place of honor in my office cubicle.

So now I can finally put my shuttle jinx to rest — and just in time, too. With the end of the shuttle program, the shuttle simulator is due to be disassembled and shipped off to Texas A&M, to be used by a new generation of aerospace engineers and virtual space jockeys. To those Aggies, I say: Godspeed ... and keep your feet on the pedals.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

Susan Crippen is to be laid off next month from her job as a shuttle crew trainer at Johnson Space Center.

Thirty years ago, Bob Crippen was on the first space shuttle crew. Twenty-four years ago, his daughter Susan became part of the space effort as well, taking a job as a shuttle crew trainer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Now the shuttle program is ending, and so is Susan Crippen's job.

I asked her whether her famous father had any advice for her. "No," she replied. "He just worries about me getting laid off."

Crippen, 46, is just one of an estimated 4,500 NASA contract employees due to lose their jobs between now and mid-August, including about 1,000 in the Houston area. She works for United Space Alliance, the shuttle program's prime contractor, as a training instructor for simulated shuttle launches and landings.

NASA file

NASA astronaut Bob Crippen floats in weightlessness during the first shuttle mission, STS-1, in 1981.

The shuttle Atlantis' astronauts went through their final simulations last Friday. After the sim, the crew of four gave Crippen and her colleagues a round of goodbye hugs. Now the shuttle crew is in Florida, getting ready for this Friday's scheduled launch. The motion-base simulator on which they trained will go to Texas A&M's aerospace engineering department.  Other training equipment will be divvied up among museums across the country. And in just a few weeks, the shuttle training team will be disbanded.

For the next few years at least, NASA's astronauts will be trained in Russia to ride in Soyuz spacecraft to and from the International Space Station, under the command of Russian cosmonauts. They'll still get training in Houston for operations aboard the space station, and for the spacewalks that will need to be conducted from the station. Eventually, the astronauts might have to learn their way around the commercial space taxis that are just now in the design and development phase. But from now on, no one will ever need to be trained to fly the space shuttle. 

When I visited the team's control room on Friday, just hours after the final sim, a half-dozen trainers were reflecting on their storied past and their uncertain future. Susan Crippen studied physics at the Unversity of Texas at Austin, and went to work at Johnson Space Center right after graduation. She's not yet sure what she's going to do after she's laid off, but it sounds as if aerospace is in her blood — in part because of the family connection.

Bob Crippen was a naval aviator who was assigned to the Air Force's military astronaut program in 1966. He became a NASA astronaut in 1969, just after the Apollo 11 moon landing. In 1981, Crippen and Apollo 16 commander John Young flew Columbia on the shuttle program's first space mission — a mission that historians now say was riskier than NASA thought at the time. After STS-1, Bob Crippen flew on the shuttle three more times. He took on a variety of management posts at NASA, left the space agency in 1995, then worked as an aerospace executive until his retirement in 2001.

Susan Crippen, the second of three daughters, still remembers that first shuttle flight.

"I did go to the first launch, but I'm not going to the last launch," she told me.

Instead, she'll be standing by at Mission Control, along with other trainers from the team.

"If anything occurs that's unexpected, our teams will get called for real-time support, and we'll go over here to the simulators, and we'll run through those procedures, kind of like in Apollo 13," shuttle training team lead Juan Garriga told the Houston Chronicle.

During Friday's final simulation run, the trainers were wearing matching green polo shirts, emblazoned with the logo for Atlantis' final mission, which is known as STS-135. Garriga made it sound as if there was a little magic in the number: He told me that when he tallied up his team's requests for the STS-135 shirts, the number of entries came to ... 135.

Maybe it's a good omen for the future. The shuttle team could sure use one.

More from Johnson Space Center:

• Inside NASA's 'Skunk Works' lab
• Last shuttle crew faces a heavy load
• After shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• How Atlantis' top tweeter got that way

The shuttle story in depth:

• Interactive: Final shuttle mission in focus
• Cast of characters: Space crews in the spotlight
• Interactive: Space shuttle timeline
• Slideshow: Atlantis, this is your life

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Richard Carson / Reuters

Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson takes a video of the media gathered before the beginning of today's news conference with fellow astronauts Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The four astronauts assigned to the last mission of NASA's 30-year-long space shuttle program aren't just burdened with the weight of history: They're expected to transfer four tons of supplies from the shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station in just a few days' time, the kind of job that's usually done with a six- or seven-person crew. They have to be ready to take shelter on the station for months, in the event that something goes wrong with their ride. And as if that weren't enough, they're being inundated with requests for tickets to watch the last-ever liftoff of America's winged spaceship.

If I were a member of Atlantis' foursome, I'd be feeling totally overwhelmed right now. But Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson sounds as if he's totally cool with a mission even he admits will be "very busy, very event-filled."

"This is the right crew for the right time," Ferguson told reporters today during the last-ever shuttle crew news conference at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Atlantis is scheduled to begin its 12-day flight with a July 8 launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle's crew of veteran NASA astronauts, including Ferguson as well as pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim, will be leaving Houston on the Fourth of July to make final preparations for liftoff.

The main objective of the shuttle program's 135th and final mission, known as STS-135, is the transfer of supplies, spare parts and science experiments from the Italian-made Raffaello cargo carrier that's sitting in Atlantis' hold. Items have been color-coded to facilitate the moving job: Everything on the shuttle that has a yellow tag goes into the space station. Everything on the station that has a green tag goes onto the shuttle for return to Earth.

The moving operation will proceed so quickly that "if you stand still and hold a yellow label in your hand," you could find yourself swept up in it, Ferguson joked.

Magnus said she visualizes forming a bucket brigade to facilitate the move. "It's fun to fly around with these bags, back and forth," she said. But even in zero-G, all these objects have inertial mass, so the astronauts have to be careful not to get thrown into a spin during the transfer operations. "You get a little lesson in Newton's laws," Magnus said.

Skeleton crew
The big move is the top priority, but the to-do list doesn't stop there. Two spacewalkers from the space station's crew, Ron Garan and Mike Fossum, will help transfer a broken coolant pump module to Atlantis' cargo bay, and bring out a robotic refueling experiment for installation on the space station. While Garan and Fossum take on maintenance tasks on the station's exterior, Atlantis' skeleton crew will play supporting roles inside the station.

The reason why there are only four astronauts on this last mission is because NASA has to have a contingency plan to keep them on the space station, in the event that serious damage is done to Atlantis during its ascent. The plan calls for the crew members to be rescued, one by one, by taking seats on Russian Soyuz craft over the course of several months. Mission planners decided that a four-person crew was the right number: small enough to make for a realistic rescue plan, while big enough to execute Atlantis' final mission.

It doesn't make the job easy for the astronauts, though. When Ferguson was asked whether there were any advantages to having a smaller-than-usual crew, he could come up with only one: "There are less opinions to contend with," he joked.

Contending with crowds
Although NASA officials haven't yet said how many people they expect to attend Atlantis' launch, it could be one of the biggest crowds to gather around the Florida launch site. At one point, mission managers thought that up to 700,000 spectators might turn out for last month's final launch of the shuttle Endeavour, and the fact that this is the last-ever chance to see a space shuttle launch could well make for higher interest this time around.

"Anybody who has not seen a shuttle launch in person is really missing out," Hurley said. Even the astronauts are having a hard time deciding who will get precious VIP tickets. (Each crew member has about 300 tickets to distribute.)

"The tickets are starting to get more valuable as the launch gets closer," Walheim said.

There's been so much hubbub about the mission that Ferguson said he was actually glad to go into quarantine, the period just before a launch when astronauts are shut off from much of the outside world for medical reasons. "I'm looking forward to a little bit of quiet time," the commander said.

The weight of history
After months of preparations, Atlantis' crew members said it was just now sinking in that they are going to be the last astronauts to ride a space shuttle into orbit — and they had mixed emotions about that. On one hand, Walheim said "we are going to lose a little bit of the beauty of the country when we retire the space shuttle." Ferguson went even further, saying that bidding farewell to the shuttle would be like mourning a friend.

On the other hand, all four astronauts pointed out that Americans would keep on flying into space — initially on Russian transports to the space station, and then on U.S.-made commercial space taxis, and then on a new breed of NASA spaceships designed to go beyond Earth orbit.

Such reflections on the shuttle's past, and on the future of spaceflight, ended up being the weightiest matters considered at today's news briefing. Ferguson predicted that the next person who flies on a U.S. spacecraft into low Earth orbit "probably will not have a NASA badge ... it'll be a badge from Boeing, or SpaceX, or Sierra Nevada." The current scenario calls for those companies' spaceships to be flown initially by private-sector test pilots, and then cleared for the space agency's use. It will take the better part of a decade before NASA astronauts once again guide the agency's next-generation spaceships to a new frontier. 

The 49-year-old commander of the last space shuttle mission recalled that he was inspired to become an astronaut by watching the launch of the first space shuttle mission 30 years ago. "I hope there will be another space vehicle ... that will inspire children in the same way," Ferguson said.

More about the last shuttle mission:

• After shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• Interactive: Final shuttle mission in focus
• Slideshow: This is your life, Atlantis

Stay tuned for more from Johnson Space Center this week, and much more about the shuttle program's final mission next week.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

NASA file

Assisted by divers, Atlantis astronaut Rex Walheim practices for a spacewalk underwater at Johnson Space Center's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. The lab's training pool will continue to be used for space station training, even after the shuttle fleet is retired. However, some of the spacewalk trainers will be laid off.

NASA managers are providing a sneak preview of the final space shuttle mission during a series of briefings today at Johnson Space Center in Houston, but they're also previewing how the space agency will change once Atlantis lands. One of the obvious changes will be the rapid reduction of the shuttle program's workforce, from about 6,700 workers today to less than a sixth of that number by the end of August.

Even those numbers pale in comparison with what the workforce was at its peak, shuttle program manager John Shannon told a gaggle of reporters at the space center, including yours truly. He estimated that 30,000 contractors were employed by the program at its height, around the time when Endeavour made its debut in 1992.

But there are a couple of bright spots on the horizon: Commercial companies are ramping up operations to take over the job of resupplying the International Space Station, and many of the shuttle program's workers are in a prime position to join those ventures. Looking further ahead, the space station's program director, Mike Suffredini, noted that the orbital outpost is making the transition from its construction phase to an operational phase that could provide more opportunities for research and development.

Here are a few of the bullet points from this morning's briefing on the shuttle and station programs:

• Shannon said the current shuttle workforce included about 5,500 contractor employees, in Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, plus slightly fewer than 1,200 NASA civil servants. A couple of days after the shuttle lands, about 3,200 contractors will be laid off. By around mid-August, less than 1,000 contractors would be left to help with the "transition to retirement" for the space shuttle fleet. NASA civil servants would be gradually reassigned to other tasks, including going over to space station operations, keeping tabs on the commercial spaceships and working on NASA's programs for exploration beyond Earth orbit.

• The shuttle program, as a program, ends "30 days after wheels stop," Shannon said. However, he estimated that the transition to retirement, including the process of getting the space shuttles to museums and documenting all the lessons learned over the past 30 years, would take another two years.

• United Space Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture that serves as the shuttle program's prime contractor, has previously floated the idea of operating two of the space shuttles as a commercial means of resupplying the space station. The idea hasn't gotten much traction to date, but Shannon said the engineers who are working on Endeavour after its final flight have been holding off from taking any actions that would make the shuttle "unrecoverable" until NASA Headquarters gives the go-ahead. "We're a little off the plan for Endeavour," Shannon told reporters. Further consideration of the United Space Alliance plan could be one of the motivations for the delay, but another possible reason would be to have a flight-capable shuttle available for engineering analysis.

• Some might ask why the shuttles have to be retired. "The bottom line is there's not enough money," Shannon said. NASA's plan for the past seven years has been to finish space station construction, then retire the fleet in order to make way for the next generation of space vehicles. Those vehicles would include spacecraft capable of going beyond Earth orbit, to a near-Earth asteroid, perhaps to the moon, and eventually to Mars. "What we're doing is we're sacrificing the shuttle to enable us to take that next step, and if we were to retire the shuttles, this is the time to do it," Shannon said.

• Suffredini said that Atlantis' mission to make the shuttle fleet's final resupply run to the space station might not sound sexy, but "it's one of the most important flights we've ever had." More than 8,000 pounds of supplies are going up to the station, including two tons' worth of critical spare parts. Those supplies will provide an additional six-month stockpile for space station operations, meaning that the astronauts will have enough supplies to see them through the end of 2012, Suffredini said. By that time, U.S. commercial transports such as SpaceX's Dragon should be part of the supply chain, along with Russian, Japanese and European supply ships.

• So far, all indications are that SpaceX will launch its next Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket by the end of this year, and have the capsule go all the way to a linkup with the space station. That demonstration would open the way for the beginning of SpaceX's resupply missions under a multibillion-dollar contract with NASA. However, Suffredini said the final decision on having the Dragon hook up with the station had not yet been made. "It's one thing to be done with hardware, it's another thing to be done with software," Suffredini said. SpaceX's work on the Dragon mission still had to go through NASA verification, and "that's going to take us till really close to the end of the year to get all that done," Suffredini said.

• Suffredini said he thought operating the U.S. segment of the space station as a national laboratory "is going to make a big difference" for commercial applications coming from space science. He mentioned the promise of creating new vaccines for salmonella and other infectious diseases, based on studies done in orbit. And he pointed out that the space station would be a cornerstone for NASA's presence in outer space. "It's not just the cornerstone, but it's the only thing from the standpoint of human spaceflight that NASA is operating," Suffredini said.

• Shannon said he was heartened to see how many veterans of the shuttle program were being taken on by other high-tech companies, in aerospace and in other fields. He said he's seen cases where former shuttle employees have been hired at one company, and then "come back and grab six of their friends."

• When one journalist noted that the parking lots and buildings at Johnson Space Center already seem emptier than they once were, Shannon acknowledged that NASA's facilities were indeed emptying out, with simulators and mockups of space hardware soon to be distributed to museums across the country. That can come as a "little bit of a shock," he admitted. But he said the space center was ready and waiting for the next chapter in NASA's history. "Let's fill it up with something else," he said. "Let's fill it up with what the next program is going to require."

Stay tuned for more from Johnson Space Center this week, and much more about the shuttle program's final mission next week.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.