GREETINGS!  Hope you’re keeping cool.  Today is my birthday, and at last it may become
one remembered in history.   The Atlantis Space Shuttle returns to planet earth tomorrow to retire and basically put an end to the space program empowered by President Kennedy
back in the 1960’s.
                                        

See it all goes back to 1969 when our the space ship Columbia went to orbit the moon.  The moon walk was originally scheduled for my 16th birthday - July 21. But things went so well that  Astronaut Neil Armstrong  & Buzz Aldrin made the historic journey to the lunar surface.  I was at a party the 20th and we watched it happen about 11pm that night. I was disappointed.  I’ve always wished it happened on the 21st.  Well, I just got my wish! 

                                          
I found this on wikipedia:
At the bottom of the ladder, Armstrong said "I'm going to step off the LEM now" (referring to the Apollo Lunar Module). He then turned and set his left boot on the surface at 2:56 UTC July 21, 1969.[74] Then spoke the famous words "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."[75]

NOW I feel so much better!!!  It was my birthday according to the UTC - a coordinated universal time that all computers and all the world are set by.  Would you believe the last man on the moon was way back in 1972?  I didn’t realize it lasted such a short time.
Tomorrow will be another historic, but sad moment because the Space Shuttle Atlantis will be retiring thanks to Obama.

                                     

Space Shuttle Atlantis is seen as it launches from pad 39A on Friday, July 8, 2011, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on mission STS-135.

So I decided to put as many cool pix of the shuttle as possible courtesy of Wikimedia
Commons.  You can use any of their awesome shots by dragging them onto your computer.  

                                 

From Wikipedia:
Space Shuttle Atlantis (Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-104) is the last active Space Shuttle orbiter in the Space Shuttle fleet belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the spaceflight and space exploration agency of the United States.[2] Atlantis was the fourth operational (and the next-to-the-last) Space Shuttle to be constructed by the Rockwell International company in Southern California, and it was delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center in eastern Florida in April 1985.[3][4]

As of the completion of its 32nd flight (STS-132), Atlantis has orbited the Earth more than 4,600 times, traveling over 120 million miles in space,[8] or more than 500 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. STS-135 will add an additional 5 million miles. Atlantis launched successfully for the final time on 8 July 2011 at 1629 GMT.

 

Blessings!
Ecclesiastes
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