International Space Station program out of 28 flights have not been to the ISS, and only the planned Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission in 2009 will not be ISS-related out of 13 planned missions until the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2010). The Space Shuttle was retired from service upon the conclusion of Atlantis' final flight on July 21, 2011. NASA was reliant even at the time on some of the resupply contracts being fielded out to Soyuz and Progress and the other unmanned tugs, but it had launched a few years earlier into a program of aggressive development of commercial US
Space Shuttle Space Shuttle The Space Shuttle was a partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program name was "Space Transportation System (STS)", taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft of which it was the only item funded for development. The first of four orbital test flights occurred in 1981, leading to operational flights beginning in 1982. In addition to the prototype whose completion was cancelled, five complete Shuttle systems were built and used on a total of 135