Hail Atlantis

The space shuttle Atlantis touched down from its - and the space shuttle program's - final flight early this morning, ending thirty years of use of NASA's fleet of reusable space vehicles in orbital flight. The shuttle, which seemed so cutting edge back in 1981 - back when personal computers were green-screen models and Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even a thought in his parents' minds - still was cutting edge, in a way, to the end. After all, the Soviet, and later post-Soviet Russian, space program has never quite had a spaceship of its own like the shuttles, and I don't think anyone failed to marvel at how versatile and practical they were.

The shuttle program had its bad moments, to be sure - the twin disasters of the Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 were the most obvious and the most horrible, and both could most likely have been prevented with more sound engineering and with better maintenance. Both explosions, in which fourteen astronauts lost their lives between them, caused launches of the other shuttles in the fleet to be postponed for over two years. (In what can only be described as a coincidence, both explosions took places in weeks beginning on Sunday, January 26.) But there were many notable moments in the launch of satellites, life science experiments that led to a greater understanding of the human body, and, of course, America's first woman in space, Sally Ride. Solar system exploration was a bittersweet experience; it was a Discovery mission that launched the Hubble space telescope in 1990, but then when the astronauts got back to Earth, it was discovered that a mirror had been ground to the wrong curvature and the telescope sent back blurry images. A servicing mission corrected the problem in 1993, and the images we've gotten of other solar systems from the Hubble telescope since then have been fantastic. But for the first three years, the Hubble telescope was the space equivalent of the Edsel.

The space shuttle program ended on a high note, servicing the international space station that promises greater space exploration to come. (Russian Soyuz spacecraft will service it - and include American astronauts - for the time being.) Complain about how the money could be better spent on earth if you want, but the space program has made possible from advanced medical imaging to global satellite positioning, so it's been a boon to our high-tech economy.

NASA won't have another new manned space vehicle for another three or four years. It's best to take the intervening time to figure out where we Americans want our space program to go from here.