The space shuttle Atlantis has landed, ending more than 30 years of the shuttle program. A lot of brave astronauts, and many more talented engineers were involved, and they should be proud of their hard work and sacrifice. That said, I doubt if I’m the only person breathing a sigh of relief. Even though it was constantly upgraded and refurbished, the shuttle was still a forty year-old design hobbled by budget-driven compromise. After Columbia, any interest I had in its mission was overridden by concern over the safety of the astronauts.
There’s a lot of mourning and chest beating about how the greatest country in the world will have to use a Russian rocket to reach the International Space Station. The simple solution to that problem is to deorbit the damn thing. The James Webb space telescope is a hell of a lot more interesting and will yield more useful science than a man can circling the globe for a few more years, yet the JWST is probably going to be cut out of the NASA budget.
Houston’s days are over — the next few years of interesting and exciting space exploration is going to be driven by JPL and Goddard. If you can’t get excited about robots orbiting asteroids or a telescope that can see 100x farther than Hubble, then there’s no excitement for you in the space program. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t still the world leaders in space exploration — we’re just not doing it the way that comic books say we should.