Discovery's Last Landing

Soon Discovery will be an icon preserved in a museum. The thrill of discovery: "Space, the Final Frontier" will not belong to America. We will not be leading the way into the vast unknowns of space. Neither Discovery nor her fellow shuttles Enterprise (the adorable first-born, who without heat shields could never be launched), Endeavour (scheduled for a final flight in April) and Atlantis (our last "space-plane" to retire, in the summer of this year) will be inspiring young and old by climbing into the heavens.

Is that fair?

Should America's Space Race end so feebly? We've not been to the moon in forty years; do we need to go back? We never made it to Mars, our nearest planetary neighbor. After Atlantis returns home, America will need to rely on the good graces of another nation--Russia!--to reach the International Space Station. Remember how the Space Race began? President John F.Kennedy challenged us to get to the moon first, before the then-Soviet Union. We made it. Apollo 11 reached the lunar surface, and men walked upon the moon. By 1972, Apollo 17 marked the end of our human exploration of the moon. That was ok, though, because we had the Space Shuttle!

Tragically, the Shuttle program would bear the burden of loss. Challenger broke our hearts as millions of children watched a teacher "break the bonds of earth." Columbia was nearly home when the signal was lost; was that the day our spirit was broken?

America is in financial ruin, facing mounting debt that currently increases at a rate of nearly $60,000 per second. That is more than $200 million dollars per hour. For less than 3 hours of debt, we can fund a shuttle mission. Of course, we can fund many other worthy causes for that amount of money, such as a year's worth (each!) of NPR and Planned Parenthood.

Before anyone attempts to prove the relative worth of those two organizations, please take a deep breath. My point is that as a nation we have been spending too much on too many programs of pork and pablum. Why is the still-functional shuttle program ending when the funds are being (in my opinion) misused and inappropriately given to NPR, PP, and others? Years ago, as NASA planned for the end of the shuttle program, they looked to return to the moon, and were working on a manned mission to Mars and beyond. The Constellation/Orion programs were funded, then unfunded, then funded again, and now...is anyone quite sure what is happening?

As a child, I watched the contrails from unmanned rockets and fully-staffed shuttles climb through the atmosphere over the Central Florida coastline. I dreamed of being in one of those vehicles one day. I would still go, I think, given the chance.

Will America's children be allowed to dream of space? How long will America's best and brightest have the chance to sail out to the black? After this summer, when again will they travel in a ship bearing the Stars and Stripes?

There are two more scheduled shuttle flights. Tonight, though, I recognize that Discovery will fly no more. "They can't take the sky from me..." but it feels somehow as if that's exactly what has happened.