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Atlantis clears the pad with the heaviest station payload the shuttle has ever flown

Sturckow's seven-member crew carries the S3/S4 truss and a pair of solar arrays to an ISS starved for power to grow.

By June 2007, the International Space Station had been under construction for nearly a decade, and power was the limiting factor on how large it could grow. Atlantis lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center on June 8, 2007, carrying the S3/S4 truss segment and a pair of new solar arrays — the heaviest station payload the shuttle had ever flown. Commander Rick Sturckow's seven-member crew installed the truss, repaired a torn thermal blanket on Atlantis's own hull, helped wrestle a stubborn solar array into its housing, and handed off a crewmember before landing at Edwards Air Force Base on June 22 — a day late, after Florida weather scrubbed two landing attempts…

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More from June 8
1789

Madison rises in the House with a list of amendments; rivals are still calling for a second convention

Drawing on more than two hundred proposals from state ratifying conventions, he moves to revise the Constitution before its opponents can dismantle it.
1906

Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act; no proclamation needed from Congress to seal off federal land

For decades, pot hunters have stripped pottery and bones from Chaco Canyon and across the Southwest. The president can now designate national monuments alone, by proclamation.
1861

Tennessee votes to leave the Union; the eleventh state is also the last

Middle Tennessee swings from 51 percent against secession in February to 88 percent in favor today, providing the decisive margin, though East Tennessee refuses to accept the result.
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A local farmer leads the 2,000-man column off the road as British reinforcements land behind them, cutting off any retreat north.
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More from Modern America
2012

Voyager 1 leaves the Sun's bubble; no craft has gone farther

Thirty-five years after launch, its instruments detect the plasma signature of true interstellar space.
2005

Katrina comes ashore at Buras; hours later, New Orleans is drowning

Fifty-three levee and floodwall breaches put 80 percent of the city underwater by nightfall.
1998

Two Stanford dropouts-in-waiting file the papers; Google is now a company

A hundred-thousand-dollar check written to a firm that didn't legally exist yet just cleared.
2013

A rocket built from retired nukes lifts a moon probe off Wallops Island

Crowds from Maine to South Carolina watch the first Minotaur V carry NASA's LADEE spacecraft into the night sky.
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