Atlantis (OV-104) was the last of the original four-orbiter fleet to go into service. Like its sister craft, it is named after a famous sailing ship. Its original namesake was a two-masted ketch operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. For 36 years from 1930, it travelled more than 800,000 km on ocean research. Atlantis arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in April 1985. Its flawless maiden flight, STS-51J in October, was a classified mission for the Department of Defense (DoD). Its second mission (STS-61B) less than two months later saw some spectacular spacewalking as Jerry Ross and Sherwood Spring practised beam assembly techniques (ACCESS and EASE) that might be used in the construction of space station Freedom. Because of the Challenger accident, Atlantis did not return to space again for three years, again on a classified DoD mission, STS-27. In 1989 Atlantis provided the launch pad for two outstanding planetary probes, Magellan to Venus (STS-30) and Galileo to Jupiter (STS-34). Its next interesting mission was STS-37 in April 1991, which featured the deployment of the gamma- ray observatory (GRO). Unscheduled spacewalking by Jerry Ross and Jay Apt was needed to free the GRO's high-gain antenna. On its second mission in 1992, STS-46, Atlantis carried the European retrievable carrier Eureca into orbit. This mission also featured the first test of the tethered satellite system (TSS-1).
