The Space Shuttle Atlantis announced its arrival at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in the early morning hours of 21 July 2011 with a double sonic boom. Just over three minutes later, the spaceship touched down on the runway and at 05:57:54 local time "wheels stop" was called for the last time. Atlantis and its crew had safely returned to Earth. NASA's space shuttles have travelled into orbit 135 times; this era ended today. The space shuttles have shaped US space policy for the last 30 years and have stood as an icon of human spaceflight for a whole generation.

The alarm clock goes off at 04:45 Eastern Daylight Time (EDT). At 05:30, breakfast. At 06:00, the ESA-DLR media delegation, consisting of a dozen journalists and a number of 'Public Affairs Officers' (as NASA calls them) is on the move. At 08:40, after obtaining additional accreditation at two badging stations, we finally arrive at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) press site.

Last night, Thilo sent back pictures of Discovery's launch that he took himself, including some taken with a remote camera. The latter were taken with the help of a sound sensor that triggered the camera, located directly at the launch pad.

After nearly four months of postponement of the final mission for Space Shuttle Discovery, I am back on site to document it in photographs. On the day before the launch, the press site at Kennedy Space Center is already filling up again but it is much quieter now than it was before the original launch date in November 2010. There are significantly less NASA activities, such as the Tweet-up, and international guests on this occasion. Launches are so complex and elaborate that any technical or meteorological complications can cause plans to change at very short notice. This has been clearly demonstrated by the delay of STS 133. In the meantime, the countdown for Discovery is running mostly according to plan.

NASA quotes "Launch week" and we're on it again. At this very moment, Thilo is on the airplane to Florida to flickr and phlog the launch of STS-133. Even if on this photo (taken in November 2010) it looks like I am travelling with him: I am not, but will blog from Cologne instead.

Tonight (that means on the night of 3 November) the Space shuttle’s Rotating Service Structure has been rolled back and revealed Discovery in its entire beauty. The Flickr set shows the respecitve images plus some more, e.g. Thilo’s camera in a bird house, prepared for launch.

In my last blogpost I said 'Thilo Kranz and me will be will be 'blogging and flickering'. Hence I've just set up a dedicated Flickr set for our photos of the STS-133 launch. For the moment I've uploaded just a couple of placeholder images, borrowed from our colleagues at NASA.

Space shuttle mission STS-133 is currently scheduled for launch on Monday, 1 November 2010. STS-133 is currently the penultimate mission of NASA's legendary Space shuttle programme. Via the 'ShuttleLaunchBlog' it is our goal to document these last Space shuttle launches by means of photographs and short captions: The end of an era in - hopefully - fascinating images - in our first photoblog.