Endings Are Beginnings

The final Shuttle mission, STS-135, ended when Atlantis touched down on this date in 2011.  It wasn't originally going to fly, but:

During an address at the Marshall Space Flight Center on November 16, 2010, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that the agency needed to fly STS-135 to the station in 2011 due to possible delays in the development of commercial rockets and spacecraft designed to transport cargo to the ISS. "We are hoping to fly a third shuttle mission [in addition to STS-133 and STS-134] in June 2011, what everybody calls the launch-on-need mission... and that's really needed to [buy down] the risk for the development time for commercial cargo", Bolden said.

The first commerical re-supply mission, CRS-1, launched in October the following year.  We wouldn't have American crewed flights resume until late 2020 with Crew-1, and relied on 27 Soyuz missions to ferry astronauts up to ISS in the meantime.

Exactly 50 years earlier, Ole Gus went up (and down) in Liberty Bell 7:

The addition of the large viewing window was a result of a change requested by Mercury astronauts. This window allowed the astronauts to have a greater viewing area than the original side port windows. The field of view was 30 degrees in the horizontal plane and 33 degrees in the vertical. The window is composed of an outer panel of 0.35-inch thick Vycor glass and a 3-layer inner panel.

That ended up being the final suborbital mission, with John Glenn's being changed to an orbital flight using the Atlas rocket:

August 18: NASA announced that analysis of Project Mercury suborbital data indicated that all objectives of that phase of the program had been achieved, and that no further Mercury-Redstone flights were planned. 

Speaking of suborbital missions, Thursday might see Starship Flight 13 finally launch (rescheduled after an abort last week):

The planned flight profile builds upon previous test flights. Starship will fly on a controlled suborbital trajectory designed to fall just short of orbit, while the Super Heavy booster executes a high-precision, controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ostensibly, the big rocket will get into orbit for a prop transfer demo later this year, although I remain skeptical.  That will involve multiple launches - not sure we've done anything like that since Apollo-Soyuz in '75 -  but least they won't be using the finicky Agena Target Vehicle.

Our baby steps continue...