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A Lot of “Last Times”

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Countdown to History for the Shuttle Program

he STS-135 crew members arrived at NASA Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility about 2:30 p.m. on July 4 for final preparations for space shuttle Atlantis' STS-135 and final mission to the International Space Station. From left are Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Doug Hurley and Mission Specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim. Photo credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett July 4, 2011

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.

atlantis, NASA

The Last Space Shuttle Mission

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Countdown To History

Atlantis blasting off on her maiden mission, October 3, 1985. Courtesy NASA.

Friday July 8th, 2011 is the targeted date for NASA’s final space shuttle mission launch. This is when Atlantis is slated to take off, bringing to an end a largely successful part of NASA’s history of human spaceflight. It seems as if this end has been a long time coming, yet in another way, it seems that it wasn’t all that long ago we were eagerly awaiting the first space shuttle launch. That took place on April 12, 1981, when Columbia took to the skies for the first time as the first reusable orbita spacecraft flight to space.

So, it’s just been slightly over 30 years of roaring blast-offs and delicate orbital dances by astronauts and orbiting “birds” as they deployed satellites, repaired and serviced Hubble Space Telescope, did science experiments, and worked on building the International Space Station. And, in two cases, Challenger and Columbia (the first orbiter), missions ended in tragedy.

It’s been a hell of a great ride, particularly for the astronauts who took their places in the cockpit and middeck of each space shuttle for every mission.  I’ve met some of those people, among them Sally Ride, Loren Acton, John Young, John Grunsfeld, Claude Nicollier, Kalpana Chawla, Ellison Onizuka, Marsha Ivins, and Michael Foale. Every one of them is the kind of person you’d want to send to space because they have what we all have come to know as the “right stuff” — that focused view on doing the job right the first time and then sharing what they know with the rest of us.

I met most of these astronauts when I was in graduate school or since then at various meetings.  Marsha Ivins came and gave a talk at the University of Colorado during a visit “back home” (she’s a fellow alum) and she was so encouraging about having all of us “keep looking up” that I’ve never forgotten her.  Kalpana Chawla was another CU alum, and we heard her give a presentation that was a marvel of clarity and enthusiasm. Claude Nicollier astonished me at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society when he asked for MY autograph (he’d read the book about Hubble that I authored with John C. Brandt), and he was one of the most gracious people I’ve ever met. Same with John Grunsfeld (who asked for my autograph when I should have been asking for his), who visited Hubble a record four times to bring our telescope back up to spec.  If it hadn’t been for folks like John and Claude and the crews of astronauts who worked on HST, I’m sure that much of our team’s science wouldn’t have gotten done.

There are scientists around the world whose work has benefited from having flown on a shuttle, or deployed to space from a shuttle.  There are also students around the world who benefited from lessons sent back from the shuttles, and ham radio operators who monitored and chatted with the astronauts as they circled the globe on their various missions.

Way back in the 80s, I dreamed of flying in a shuttle, maybe as a payload specialist or something. I never made it. But that dream sent me back to school to at least TRY to make it, and I ended up studying as much astronomy and space science and planetary science as I could gobble up. Ultimately I came out of graduate school more grounded in space than I ever expected. Even though I’m not “of” space travel, I write more about it and share it with other people.  For that, I have the space shuttle program to thank — even though I wasn’t “of” that, either. But, as a spur to doing greater things — hey — it worked!

So, as I watch the last launch on Friday, it will be with a tremendous sense of history and pride in a program that showed us what could be done. Sure, it wasn’t without its problems (both technical AND political), but the shuttles showed us what could be done when people put their minds to working and living in low-Earth orbit.  I can only hope that the next program does the shuttles one better — which is a tall order to fill for a program that is still being developed.  As they retreat into the annals of human spaceflight history, those shuttles are leaving behind some mighty big vapor trails to fill.