THANK-YOU in shoutout for the memories of the space shutle program first of all. THANK-YOU to all who went up in those same shutles. THANK-YOU to the 14 who gave their lives during the 30 period. THANK-YOU NASA for a job well done!
Found this article about private business taking over from NASA:
No immediate replacement for the space shuttle. :(
If you would have asked me back during Reagan's days, where would we be with our US space program in 2011. My reply would have been enthusiast, with mentioning of a moon colony and dedicated space ships. But hey we have Facebook (bleh.)
Gene Kranz is right. We do need to finish the job. With the landing of Atlantis, it is a temporary pit stop. We will continue to do what we have done so well since 1961. The race with the Russians helped spur us on to do all the wonderful things we did. We accomplishe two things they never did. We landed men, repeatedly, on the moon and we launched and returned, repeatedly, a manned, re-usable space shuttle. We did that with near perfection. Well done NASA for all the successes you had. I was on hell of a ride.
The final numbers, in terms of people flown abourd shuttles are these. In the entire Space Shuttle program 355 individuals had a seat on the shuttle. Of those, 292 came from the United States, 21 from Russia, 2 from Belgium, 8 from Canada, 7 from France, 6 from Germany, 5 from Italy, 7 from Japan, and 1 each from Isreal, Mexico, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. That’s 15 countries.
49 women flew, 44 from the United States, 1 from Russia, 2 from Canada and Japan.
Again I say congratulations to all those that were involved with the Space Transportation System. You all did this country proud. You have earned your place in history. Thank you for all those wonderful memories.
Never again will I see the shuttle docked to ISS. ISS itself serves as a reminder of how far we came. The greatest accomplishment of the shuttle for manned spaceflight was allowing us to learn how to build and maintain an immense structure in orbit.
ISS may not be the first space station by any means, but it is by far the largest and most complex. The challenges we faced were the most valuable part of the whole station program, and the shuttle’s crowning achievement imho.
When the shuttle program started, many people had serious doubts about our ability to safely conduct the amount of spacewalks that would be necessary to build a station of that size. We’ve now mastered extremely complex and lengthy spacewalks, and tremendously improved their safety by developing an emergency suit propulsion system. Best of all, we’ve proven we can build large, complex spacecraft in orbit. That may seem like stating the obvious, but when the shuttle started no one really knew for sure if it could be done. By 2007, the shuttle had accumulated more than 100 spacewalks, and additional walks were initiated from the space station that it helped build. The total time spent performing space station EVAs is now in excess of 1000 hours, 42 days straight over 160 EVAs. That would have seemed insurmountable pre-shuttle. Even when these plans were being laid out, they called it the “EVA wall.” We’ve now scaled that wall and learned a tremendous amount from it.
Before shuttle, the US had accomplished a grand total of 39 spacewalks from Gemini through Skylab, and almost half of those were done on the surface of the moon, not free floating in space.
Was it worth the money and lives lost? I suppose that all depends on what we decide to do with the knowledge and experience we gained. If we let it die here, then those lives were mostly lost in vain. If we continue orbital construction of complex vehicles and bases, then I would argue it was all worth it.
One day, sooner or later, we will find an asteroid with a high risk of impact, and when that happens it will take multiple launches with the same construction techniques learned here in order to build something capable of diverting it. This is not just about exploration and eventual resource utilization, though that’s certainly a big factor, it’s about defense as well.
In the years to come, when I look up and see the space station without the shuttle ever docked to it, it will remind me of what’s at stake, and how everything we learned is at risk of being lost.
Farewell Atlantis, it was good to see you up there one last time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgoVGWazev8
In 1984, while in Colorado Springs, I had the honor of seeing the Columbia traveling overhead. It was a preannounced flight path which fortunately occurred on a very clear night. I was amazed at how wickedly fast that craft moved.
I woke early this morning to the familiar, but still startling, twin sonic boom as she passed over the state of Florida. It took me about 30 seconds to realize what it was, and then, sadly, I informed my wife that that would be the last time we ever heard that sound. R.I.P Shuttle program.
