Countdown to History for the Shuttle Program

Today was the last day that a space shuttle crew will fly in for a mission. The four crew members for STS-135 arrived at the Kennedy Space Center, their aircraft signaled to a stop by ground crew waving American flags.

There are a LOT of “lasts” with this mission. It’s been a long time coming, and each step towards Atlantis’s final flight is the last time that step will be taken.  In May, we saw the rollover of Atlantis from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC. It was last such rollover. A few weeks later, Atlantis, mated to her SRBs and tank, rolled out of the VAB for the last time.

In a few days’ time, we’ll witness the last time a shuttle will be revealed during RSS retract. And, the next day, the last liftoff of a shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center will occur.

I know it’s a time of great sadness for people who worked on the space shuttles, and for those of us who followed the flights from Day 1 in 1981. But, in reality, this is the way life is.  Old technology reaches the end of its useful lifetime and it either has to be updated, re-engineered, or replaced.

Many factors went into the decision to stop the shuttle program, some of them were practical, others political. I’m not going to get into a big discussion here about who killed the shuttle program (it wasn’t President Obama, in case you thought that — you have to look further back in presidential history to see who among all the politicoes and policy makers is really responsible) or what will replace it. Perhaps another time. The point I want to make here is that for 30 years, we’ve gone to space with the shuttles. They’ve served an extremely useful purpose. And, if money were no object in this country, I’m quite sure that we’d find ways to extend their lifetimes or, even better, design newer, better shuttles to replace these — much as an airline replaces its older aircraft with newer ones.

But, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen with the shuttles, and so we now must go to space in other ways and find other means to fly to the stars.  It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even the end of space exploration. In case people have forgotten, NASA (and other space agencies around the world) are still out there studying the stars and planets with space-borne telescopes and planetary probes. The only thing that’s changed is the U.S. human access to space. The shuttles are rolling into history — and that’s as it should be. I hope that as we wave them goodbye, we don’t let this be the last time NASA sends people to space from U.S. soil.