Slashdot Mirror
Atlantis Lands, Ending the Shuttle Era
Early this morning Atlantis landed at KSC in Florida. I've been following the trip intently ever since my trip to Florida to see the launch of the very last Shuttle. This really is the end of an era. Thanks go out to the thousands of NASA employees who made this happen, many of whom have been laid off. A number of them emailed me directly showing me pictures and sharing stories. I wish you all the best. As for America, here's hoping that we return to space soon.
While the Shuttle program has ended (and its been a spectacular run), I guess the only things to look forward to are the MPCV, CTS-100, Dragon, DreamChaser, and the New Sheppard.
I think the future is looking pretty bright.
The fact that the Shuttle was still flying in 2011 isn't just a testament to its longevity. It's a sad reminder that, at least for now, human spaceflight is at the mercy of the schizophrenia that is the American political process.
NASA has consistently brought together some of the finest minds in the world to do what the preceding finest minds thought was impossible. Then, because this is America, we take a bunch of mouth-breathers who probably got Cs and Ds in basic high school science courses and make them the bosses and the gatekeepers, the people who decide that it's more important to systematize the abuse of human rights at airports and buy the jokers at the Pentagon their newest murder toy than it is to push the frontiers of knowledge and ingenuity.
I'm putting my hope for the future of space exploration in private hands. Not because I fetishize the free market, or because I think government is evil, but because human spaceflight is way too important to be put in the hands of the American electorate, which is probably the stupidest and most poorly-informed decision-making body since the Athenian ekklesia.
Atlantis flew a magnificent mission, capping a great career. She, and her sisters, have been great ships and deserve to retire with honour.
Yeah, they were expensive. Yeah, people think robots are cooler. Yeah, they couldn't go to the moon or Mars. And yeah, in hindsight hanging a somewhat fragile spaceship on the side of a booster probably wasn't the best idea.
But Atlantis and her sisters' record of achievement is magnificent, and will probably never be matched. They launched space probes, they conducted research into materials, life sciences, earth sciences, astronomy, and countless other fields. They serviced satellites and space stations, and brought tonnes of equipment back to earth for study and reflight. They provided a convenient platform for experiments and payloads that would otherwise have had to construct their own complete satellites. They did all this 133 times successfully, with only two losses, and in the space business you'd take that success rate any day of the week.
The knowledge isn't all gone just yet. My father worked on the guidance and control systems and simulations for all the Saturns except the first test vehicle, the Apollo-Saturn Telescope Mount, the Space Shuttle Main Engines, and Spacelab (as well as helping others in his group with things like Hubble and Gravity Probe B).
However, your point about the schizophrenic management is correct; since then he's worked on X-33, X-34, Ares I, and Ares V guidance/control systems/simulations, with effectively nothing to show for it. Now he's waiting to see if the White House will ever move on the next heavy-lift vehicle (that Congress already appropriated money for). He's coming up on 50 years working for NASA (45 years in civil service and almost 5 as a part-time contractor).
NASA's biggest challenge has always been funding and the year-to-year budget process. There really should be some way to budget more than one year at a time; that just doesn't work very well for long-term projects.
Hey, tell your dad thanks for putting up with all the garbage and trying to make a difference.
- A. Taxpayer
Someone else said it originally, but if you play NASA's history backwards, they start out with no manned space flight capability, develop shuttles, and eventually land on the moon.