Space Shuttle program upgrade equipment for Hubble were ready and waiting in NASA warehouses. Many dissenters, including astronauts , asked NASA management to reconsider allowing the mission, but initially the director stood firm. On October 31, 2006, NASA announced approval of the launch of "Atlantis" for the fifth and final shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, scheduled for August 28, 2008. However SM4/STS-125 eventually launched in May 2009. One impact of "Columbia" was that future crewed launch vehicles, namely the Ares I, had a special emphasis on crew safety compared to other considerations. NASA maintains extensive, warehoused catalogs of recovered pieces
Space Shuttle Atlantis with Space Shuttle "Atlantis" over the course of its 33 missions. Because the shuttle sometimes flew crew members arriving and departing Mir and the ISS, not all of them launched and landed on "Atlantis". Astronaut Clayton Anderson, ESA astronaut Leopold Eyharts and Russian cosmonauts Nikolai Budarin and Anatoly Solovyev only launched on "Atlantis". Similarly, astronauts Daniel Tani and Sunita Williams, as well as cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov only landed with "Atlantis". Only 146 men and women both launched and landed aboard "Atlantis". Some of those people flew with "Atlantis" more than once. Taking them into account, 203 total