Cape Canaveral, Fla. ? NASA is getting hit up for extra launch passes, and mission stickers and pins are flying off the shelf. Another Twittering crowd is descending on the space center. Even science fiction writers want in on the action.

Welcome to space shuttle Atlantis’ 32nd and final voyage.

When Atlantis blasts off — show time is 1:20 p.m. CDT today — only two more missions will remain before the shuttle program ends.

Besides equipment for the International Space Station, Atlantis holds two big tool bins that are crammed full of shuttle and station memorabilia: flags, medallions, bookmarks and the like.

The rotating service structure moves away from the space shuttle Atlantis on Thursday at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The final launch of the space shuttle Atlantis is planned for today.

Three miles from the pad, the firing room where launch controllers will give one final “go” is decorated with photos of Atlantis launching, flying in space and landing over the past 25 years. The collage includes patches from each mission, including the last, which depicts Atlantis sailing into the sunset.

Perhaps the only people in town who refuse to fuss over Atlantis’ last flight are the six astronauts who will ride the rocketship into the history books. That’s because NASA’s future is fuzzy. Hope persists that Atlantis will ride yet again, launch director Mike Leinbach noted Wednesday.

“The six of us are calling this the first last flight of Atlantis and I think that’s appropriate because we really don’t know what she’s going to do next,” explained commander Kenneth Ham.

Shuttle managers prefer calling it Atlantis’ “last planned flight.”

What they mean is that when Atlantis returns from its 12-day trip, it won’t be dismantled and head off to a museum. Instead, NASA will prep the shuttle as usual for a possible rescue mission for the very last flight, Endeavour’s in November.

Assuming no rescue mission is needed — and none has yet — just about everybody at NASA would like to launch Atlantis anyway with a load of supplies. After all, it will be primed to fly with a fuel tank and a set of boosters. NASA’s top officials would like a heads-up from the White House by the end of June.

“One last hurrah” is how longtime astronaut Jerry Ross puts it.

Ross, now a NASA manager, is one of only two people to fly in space seven times — five on Atlantis.

At a news conference last week, Ross rattled down the list of Atlantis-by-the-numbers: 31 flights, 282 days in orbit, 116 million miles, 4,462 orbits of Earth, 185 crew members.

The upcoming mission will tack on 12 days, 186 orbits, 4 million miles and four astronauts.

Atlantis made its debut in 1985 as the fourth in NASA’s vaulted space shuttle series, and went on to launch NASA’s Venus-bound Magellan, Jupiter-bound Galileo and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. It flew seven times to Russia’s old Mir space station and 10 times to the International Space Station. It carried out the final Hubble Space Telescope repair mission last May.

“This is never going to be routine, and it’s something I’m really going to miss seeing,” Ross said.