The space shuttle program ended today as the wheels of Atlantis stopped on the runway at Kennedy Space Center. This is a truly momentous day for Houston’s space and science community for many reasons, and my time will be spent working on our Final Mission blog.

In the meantime, I offer a full transcript of an interview I did with space shuttle program manager John Shannon this week. He’s got some interesting thoughts at the end on how the shuttle’s retirement may finally spur the nation’s leadership to develop a successor.

In the past you’ve said you weren’t ready to talk about emotions, because you were focused on the missions. Now that we’re really at the end, how do you feel?

I’ve been much more reflective on this flight than in the past. Normally, while flying the shuttle, I’m busy running control boards and having engineering and budget meetings and all the things to keep the program going. And all that has pretty much disappeared. I’ve been really lucky to be able to go to the control center, and spend a lot of time there, and with the engineering and integration teams, and it’s just been really nice. I would just say I feel blessed to be a part of this program that I think really shows this nation at its best. To be with these people has just been a blessing.

I walk around and people are still completely focused on the mission and finishing strong, and since it was the U.S. space policy that we would retire the space shuttle once the International Space Station was complete, we put together a plan to do that. And the plan has come off exactly like we had hoped. So I do have an immense feeling of satisfaction that, if we had to end this program, this is the way we wanted to end it.

John Shannon, center, and Juan Garriga, a shuttle training team lead, during training for Atlantis' crew for the final time in the shuttle Motion Base Simulator a Johnson Space Center. (Smiley N. Pool/Chronicle)

Most of your people will lose their jobs in the next month. How have they maintained their focus?

The professionalism of this team is incredible. People just love what they’re doing. They love working in this environment and doing things that are difficult.

It’s got to be hard for you to see them go.

My goal has been to really try and keep as many of the contractors and civil servants in the space community as we can. If we can do that it will make us that much more successful in the future. But it’s hard. They are highly sought after technical experts in all kinds of different specialties.

What are their options? Are there openings in the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle program?

It’s tough right now because the new program is not really well defined, and the MPCV program came out of Constellation so it was already fully populated. So we’re not seeing a lot of movement there. A lot of the civil servant folks will go into the technology development programs that will look at the beyond-Earth projects that have been spelled out. You know of course funding is a big issue right now, and there’s a significant amount of uncertainty.

We went from probably the most certain of environments, how to fly a space shuttle, to a very uncertain environment that’s what we’re doing next. I have a lot of optimism that it will be defined over the coming months, but it’s not yet and that gives people some anxiety.

What’s next for you?

I have no idea. It really is up in the air right now. I asked my team to stay with me through the final landing, and so because of that, when asked about other jobs I’ve said after we land I will put my head up and look around. I want to do something to help the agency. I think that’s true of the entire shuttle leadership team. I didn’t think it would be right for me, asking everyone to stay with me and finish this right, to be out lobbying for different jobs. So it has been totally on hold until after we land.

Shannon shakes hands with shuttle commander Chris Ferguson. (Smiley N. Pool/Chronicle)

Have you had any regrets as you’ve gone through the last several flights?

I tell you, it couldn’t have gone any better. The contractor leadership has done a tremendous job of treating their people with respect, and that’s what we really required of them. What I think is amazing, as big as this program is, you really don’t see reports of people complaining or whining, even though they’re being laid off in a difficult economy. As far as the missions, we planned some pretty aggressive missions. I was pretty worried back in January when we still had three flights ahead of us and a limited budget horizon, and we were still struggling with the external tank. But then it all just came together extremely well and that was because of the dedication of the team. It was pretty amazing to me.

I was sitting in the ISS mission management and each of the international partners, like ESA, JAXA, Canada, they all talked about the shuttle and what the shuttle has meant to them and the international space station. It was pretty overwhelming. At Kennedy as well, it was really tough walking out of the launch control center for the last time and then going to talk to all the workforce at the VAB. The team deserved to finish up this way because they have really earned it.

How confident do you feel about the future of Johnson Space Center?

I have absolutely no doubts at all. It’s tough, because we’re in the midst of change, and we don’t totally … there isn’t a lot of clarity to the vision. But if you can see where we’re heading by turning the low-Earth orbit activities over to the commercial guys, I think it’s time to do that, and we have a lot of knowledge to do that, and we can let NASA focus on beyond-Earth activities. The risk is that the nation will decide they don’t want to fund those activities. So everyone is kind of treading lightly. I think the commercial guys are going to be successful. I think they’re going to keep ISS supplied and get crew there. But because we don’t have the design and budget completely solidified and where we want it to be it’s hard.

Do you think NASA will be given the resources it needs to build a shuttle successor?

I think one of the silver linings of retiring the shuttle is that it should drive some urgency in both NASA and the administration and Congress that will say we really need to commit now. In the past we’ve made half steps and then we quit. But now that we don’t have the shuttle any more, we really need to commit to the next program. I think there are enough lessons learned out of the shuttle and canceled programs that we can really make a go of it this time. That’s my hope anyway, that the urgency will be built from the shuttle’s retirement, and it will carry us through.

That’s a good point.

We always had the shuttle. Once it gets hard or expensive, when it gets over budget or the schedule slips, it was easy to say, “Well let’s just continue flying the shuttle, then. We’ll come tackle this at a later date when the economy’s better, or XYZ problem is solved, or we’re not engaged in this other activity nationally.” We always had the shuttle to fall back on. You get three big things from retiring the shuttle. The first is that sense of urgency, the I-don’t-have-a-domestic-vehicle-that-I can-launch-astronauts-and-do-the-beyond-Earth-orbit-activities-we-would-like-to-do vehicle. The second thing you get is a little bit of money back. The shuttle program pays for a lot of infrastructure around the space agency, so the savings from ending the shuttle is only about $1 billion a year to invest in something else. And you’ll get the people. And I think this is huge.

One of the things we probably did not do right when we were doing new human spaceflight programs is we didn’t take the ones that had really made the shuttle program work and make them move over to the new programs. I think you’re going to have people who are used to doing things, and getting things accomplished, and working under tight schedules and budgets. I think those three things are really going to help NASA, the urgency, the budget back and the people.