Engineering film footage of the final shuttle launch

VIDEO: By the light of a waning moon, the space shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth on July 21, dropping out of predawn darkness to close out NASA’s 135th and final shuttle voyage, a long-awaited – and long-dreaded – milestone marking the end of an era for American manned space flight. (Membership Required)

A spectacle never seen before — a space shuttle external fuel tank traversing city streets — was witnessed in Los Angeles on Saturday as the relic was moved to the museum that will construct a rocket science attraction.

Sixty years ago Monday, a 27-year-old Russian test pilot named Yuri Gagarin strapped into a Vostok capsule in Central Asia and rode into orbit atop a launcher derived from a Soviet nuclear missile, becoming the first human to travel into the void of space. Twenty years later, in 1981, the era of reusable spacecraft dawned with the first launch of NASA’s space shuttle.