The booming tourist area and haven for high-tech Nasa jobs known as the Space Coast is struggling with sadness, bitterness and fear for the future as the US shuttle programme draws to a close.

Three decades of human spaceflight driven by the iconic shuttle program have fuelled growth in this Atlantic coast beach community, but the end of those glory days are hurtling closer with the final flight of Atlantis on Friday.

The last shuttle mission will trigger the disappearance of some 27,000 jobs either directly or indirectly tied to Nasa’s shuttle efforts, according to local officials.

“This is really like losing a family member,” said Marcia Gaedcke, president of the Chamber of Commerce of the Titusville area, explaining that residents have experienced some of the well-known stages of grieving.

“We have gone through denial – that it’s not going to happen... and we got to anger that it is happening to us,” she said.

“Those orbiters are like people to us. They have personality and we think of them as members of our family.”

Like many long-time inhabitants of Titusville, Ms Gaedcke is personally linked to the shuttle programme: Her father, brother and sister have all worked at Kennedy Space Centre. She even worked there herself for a while.

But the town of 45,000 people is bracing for the loss of 40 percent of the 8,000 jobs – many held by highly paid and well-educated residents – that directly depend on Kennedy Space Centre and vanish with the shuttle.

At one popular restaurant where current and former Kennedy Space Centre employees like to gather, the atmosphere was morose when patrons were asked about the end of the shuttle.

“It’s very sad to see that,” said Betty Ford, a retiree who worked as a document manager at Kennedy Space Centre.

She said she has watched nearly every launch, dating back before the shuttle flight in 1981 to first human spaceflights by the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo missions in the 1960s.

“Pretty much all of my life I saw the space programme,” she said.

Once the shuttle program ends, the world’s astronauts can hitch a ride on a Russian Soyuz capsule at a cost of $51 million per ticket.

“The next five years will be very tough,” said Melissa Stains, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Cocoa Beach, a beach town a short drive from Kennedy Space Centre.

With the next US human spaceflight a minimum of four years away, she said it will be a struggle for even private companies like Boeing, SpaceX and others to fill the economic void that the shuttle’s closure will leave behind.

“Just recently, Nasa laid off 450 and SpaceX hired five. So it’s not the same and we need to encourage other business to come,” she said, pointing to hopes that alternative energy companies might come to make use of the abundant wind and sun.

According to the director of the Space Coast Office of Tourism, Rob Varley, the shuttle programme averaged several launches per year, and each brought in $5-6 million, meaning a $25-30 million loss per year.

Tourism is focusing on the area’s other attractions, such as offering cruises from nearby Port Canaveral to Disney World in Orlando, some 70 kilometres away.

One sure draw will be the shuttle Atlantis, which will make its retirement home at a section of the Kennedy Space Centre open to visitors.

But with no more active launches, Ms Varley hopes tourists will want to come watch private companies test their rockets – such launches happen 15-20 times per year, he said.

“Our challenge is going to be how do we keep people engaged in the space program that will continue here,” he said.

Factbox: Major moments

The US space shuttle is part cargo truck, part passenger bus, part airplane built for orbit, and has known soaring highs and devastating lows during its 30-year career in spaceflight.

The shuttle programme was born in 1972 with the decision by President Richard Nixon to launch the programme, which would become the major focus of US human spaceflight ambitions over the next four decades.

A prototype called Enterprise was built for test flights but never reached space. Columbia became the first shuttle to fly in orbit with its launch on April 12, 1981 with two astronauts on board.

Five years into the programme, which mainly focused on deploying satellites into orbit and conducting experiments in space, disaster struck when the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff on January 28, 1986.

The blast was seen on live television by countless Americans including millions of school children who tuned in to watch the shuttle lift off carrying teacher Christa McAuliffe, 37, who planned to be the first to give lessons from space.

Ms McAuliffe and the other six crew on board perished, and the shuttle programme was grounded for nearly three years. The cause of the problem was linked to a faulty seal on one of the rocket boosters.

The shuttle programme launched its first return-to-flight mission in September 1988 with Discovery, the same orbiter that in 1990 would deploy the Hubble Space Telescope, which has revolutionised the world’s knowledge of astronomy.

The Hubble mission was piloted by Charles Bolden, who today is Nasa’s chief administrator and the first African-American to hold the US space agency’s top post.

In 1993, the shuttle Endeavour and its crew of seven embarked on a mid-orbit repair mission to clear up a problem with the telescope’s main mirror, and in early 1994 the first sharp images from Hubble were released.

Four more maintenance missions have been performed on subsequent shuttle flights, the latest being in 2009.

The start of a Russian-American partnership in space was signed by President George H. W. Bush and Russian president Boris Yeltsin, so that Russian cosmonauts would fly on US shuttles and US astronauts would spend time working aboard the Russian Mir Space Station.

Mir, an orbiting laboratory that was the world’s largest until it was replaced by the International Space Station, was operational from 1986 to 2001.

Discovery’s flight in February 1995 marked the first Russian-US mission. The orbiter carried a Russian cosmonaut and performed the first flyaround of the station by a US shuttle in preparation for the first mission to Mir by Atlantis four months later.

Atlantis brought five Russians and one American on its trip to Mir in June-July 1995. A total of nine shuttle missions eventually docked at the Russian space lab, bringing supplies and equipment.

The most important mission for the space shuttle came with the start of construction on the International Space Station in 1998.