STS-117 was a Space Shuttle mission flown by Space Shuttle Atlantis, launched from pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center on June 8, 2007. Atlantis lifted off from the launch pad at 19:38 EDT. Damage from a hail storm on February 26, 2007, had previously caused the launch to be postponed from an originally-planned launch date of March 15, 2007. The launch of STS-117 marked the 250th orbital human spaceflight. It was also the heaviest flight of the Space Shuttle.

The process of assembling the International Space Station (ISS) has been under way since the 1990s. Zarya, the first ISS module, was launched by a Proton rocket on 20 November 1998. The STS-88 Space Shuttle mission followed two weeks after Zarya was launched, bringing Unity, the first of three node modules, and connecting it to Zarya. This bare 2-module core of the ISS remained uncrewed for the next one and a half years, until in July 2000 the Russian module Zvezda was launched by a Proton rocket, allowing a maximum crew of three astronauts or cosmonauts to be on the ISS permanently.