It landed just a few minutes at the Kennedy Space Center.
There are three shuttle flights left. Each flight will now be the farewell space flight for that particular shuttle.
I'm not sorry to see the Shuttle Program come to an end, but I sure wish I had more confidence that there will be more American manned space flights anytime soon.
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Dear Miss Fit:
On the morning of May 5th, 1961 at a few minutes after 9:00 AM EST, the staff of an elementary school in northern New Jersey filled the auditorium with students (including a certain seventh-grader smitten by all flying things). The purpose of the assembly was to watch as the launching of Alan Shepard's sub-orbital Mercury-Redstone flight was shown on a 21" black-and-white television. It was enthralling, clearly marking the beginning of something Really Big!
Sometime late in September of 2010, I plan to be watching as the same orbiter Discovery that landed today, will land for the last time. Mission elapsed time: 49 years 4 months and some days. I suspect that it will mark the end of something Really Big.
If you'd talked to that kid back in 1961 (yeah, OK, it was me) and told him that, having watched the start of the American manned space flight program, in less than 50 years he'd get to watch the end of it, he...WOULD...NOT...BELIEVE...YOU!
But that was an America where John F. Kennedy could say:
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Forty-nine years ago, that rhetoric galvanized America and took all of us to the Moon. That America, not without problems, was in some ways far more admirable than the one we live in today where challenges are to be avoided, not embraced.
Sorry for the rant.
Frank
Manned space flight in an era of declining real per-capita wealth is going to end eventually because the world is becoming too poor to sustain such an extravagance. There are resources in space, but without vulcanism to distill them into higher concentrations, even low-grade ores (of which we have plenty) are more economical to mine and refine -- not to mention landfills, I suspect as resources become more scarce landfill-mining will become increasingly common to recover all the resources that have been dumped into landfills over the past couple of centuries.
It seems sad that mankind is doomed to fail with a fizzle, rather than a boom. But the speed-of-light limit pretty much makes that a given. Getting to anywhere worth getting to would require so many resources that from a practical matter it is impossible. If we eventually create artificial intelligences we could send them to the stars, since chronological time would not be a big issue for them (just turn'em off until they get where they're going), but given that it would take hundreds of years just to get them to the nearest star system at the sub-relativistic speeds that are practical, the thought that notoriously short sighted human beings would ever do so -- or, for that matter, would care to keep listening for this intelligence's communications hundreds of years later -- is not particularly high.
Of course, if we ever do develop real artificial intelligences, we can guess that with their longer possible lifespans they might have different perspectives. But it does seem that our future is going to be far more constrained than what seemed the case when we were little children. Inevitable, but... sad. But reality just is, and doesn't care about our empty dreams...
- Badtux the Dreamless Penguin
If this is the best that we ever can do, BadTux, then we have started the gradual slide towards, if not our extinction, the end of our civilization.
I can't and won't accept that. I won't accept that we are never again going to set foot on another celestial body. I can't accept that we are nothing more than a very large scale-up of the old experiment of putting a few bacteria in a Petrie dish of nutrient agar and then watching them multiply and poison themselves off with their own wastes.
You're spot on, EBM. We're Roman civilization, late period, about to collapse from exhaustion of critical resources. They ran out of fertile soil, bronze and iron for their legions, wood for their stoves, pretty much every resource that kept their civilization up and going, the most important resource exhausted being, for lack of a word, a clue. I.e., they forgot that the kabuki theatre around the Emperor's throne was just a game of musical chairs if the economy of the Empire itself was in free fall, and eventually they were a few thousand barbarians squabbling over bricks in the ruins of a city built to house millions.
That is our future: A few huddled survivors in the ruins of cities built to house millions, a few huddled survivors who spend all their time not spent scrabbling for scraps of food arguing over whether Republicans or Democrats are the Nazis. That's our future. Looking at our so-called "leaders", and at our so-called "populace", I don't see two clues to rub together there about the real problems facing our civilization, and no inclination at all to address those real problems.
We are so fucked.
- Badtux the Pessimistic Penguin
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