The shuttle's safe nighttime landing on Jmarked the end of American-launched crewed missions to space for almost exactly nine years, until Hurley and Behnken launched on a SpaceX Crew Dragon on May 30, 2020. The empty middeck on the shuttle - as there were only four crew members on STS-135 instead of the usual six or seven people - also allowed the shuttle to bring home a little bit of extra trash and unneeded supplies from the space station, ahead of expected years of flights from the three-person Russian Soyuz spacecraft and a fleet of smaller cargo ships with less capacity than the space shuttle. Among its milestones, the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello made its final trip to orbit in the shuttle's payload bay, filled to the brim with its maximum of 16 resupply racks to exchange experiments in space. STS-135 was a major supply run for the International Space Station, an orbiting complex that relied on the space shuttle to bring up the major pieces. NASA's space shuttle program in pictures: A tribute
The pair spent two months at the International Space Station before returning home. He did end up going back, flying alongside SpaceX Demo-2 pilot and fellow NASA astronaut Bob Behnken in May 2020 on the first crewed orbital flight from the U.S. "You just have to take it all in, because you never know if you're going to go back," Hurley said. The teamwork came to a culmination during their last night in orbit, when Hurley, Walheim, mission specialist Sandy Magnus and commander Chris Ferguson all sat on the flight deck silently drinking in the view of the nighttime Earth below. It still was a quick turnaround with a nine-month training cycle rather than the usual year or more, said mission pilot Doug Hurley, but the crew felt a sense of camaraderie that brought them through the intense experience. But Walheim and his crewmates were ready to go when the announcement came, having been in training for three months before STS-135 was finally officially authorized.
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