...The Final Frontier

About an hour ago, I witnessed the end of an era as the space shuttle Atlantis cleared the launch pad for the final time. The mission, which will take the shuttle to the International Space Station on Sunday, is scheduled return to the earth on July 20, just two days shy of the forty-second anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.*

I was five years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface. In fact, the space program was the first news event I remember being aware of and interested in as a child, although I do remember being somewhat irritated when my Saturday morning cartoons were interrupted for live coverage of Alan Shepherd hitting golf balls on the moon. Nonetheless, I was a big astronaut fan. I ate Space Food Sticks, drank Tang, played with my Major Matt Mason toys, and watched Star Trek religiously, considering it a foregone conclusion that the starship Enterprise would someday be a reality.

I also remember feeling very let down when the Apollo lunar missions came to an end in 1972. Somehow Skylab and the Apollo/Soyuz "handshake in space" in the mid-1970s seemed more than a little anti-climactic after exploring the moon. It seemed to me that we should be reaching out even further to Mars and beyond instead of shackling ourselves to low earth orbit.

That future seemed to be within our grasp in the late 1970s, when the first shuttle prototype, the Enterprise, named for TV's most famous starship, rolled out of the hangar to sound of a military band playing the theme from Star Trek while several members of the show's cast looked on. Still, TV continued to stay a few steps ahead of reality.

A couple of years before the space shuttle Enterprise made its debut, another show called Space: 1999 took to the airwaves. Set on a moon that had been blasted out of earth's orbit by massive explosions at a lunar nuclear waste dump, the show depicted what seemed a very realistic view of earth's next logical step in space, a permanent colony on the moon. The Eagle spaceships on that show not only bore the name of the first lunar lander, they looked as though their design could have evolved from the Apollo LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) spacecraft.  Unfortunately, that vision of the future also has yet to come to pass.

As the 1980s dawned, so did a new era for America's efforts at manned space exploration. In the spring of 1981, the space shuttle Columbia set off on its maiden voyage, lifting the nation's spirits with it. I remember watching TV coverage of the event and thinking 'I feel good about America again' as the malaise of the post-Vietnam/post-Watergate era seemed to fall away with the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank. I regarded the concept of a reusable spacecraft as a bold first step toward that starship future. Unfortunately, the space shuttle program had a few obstacles to overcome in order to reach its full potential, including the tragic loss of the Challenger in January 1986 and Columbia in February 2003.

The first problem was that the original intention for the shuttle was to ferry people and materiel to a space station. Originally, that space station was to be Skylab, but the shuttle was also needed to give Skylab the occasional boost to a higher orbit. Unfortunately, the shuttle's development took longer than expected and Skylab's orbit continued to decay until it crashed back to earth in 1979, two years before Columbia left the launch pad for the first time. By the time the shuttle program got under way in earnest, it was without a destination and instead served as both shuttle and station for orbital experiments. It would not be until the mid-1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the shuttle began fulfilling its original mission by making regular visits to Russia's Mir space station and then serving as a heavy lift vehicle for sections of the International Space Station.

In the spring of 1996, I was fortunate enough to witness one of those launches, STS-76, when Atlantis took off to Rendezvous with Mir. The husband of a cousin of my mother's was on the shuttle crew, so my parents and I were included on the guest list and got to watch the pre-dawn launch from the bleachers across the river from the launch pad. The flames from the shuttle's main engines and solid rocket boosters lit up the still dark sky in a spectacular manner. There are no words to adequately describe the experience of seeing a shuttle launch up close and personal. Unless you have experienced the deep roar and felt the vibration of those engines as the shuttle takes to the sky for yourself, you cannot fully comprehend the true extent of its power and majesty.

Seeing Atlantis leave the pad again today, albeit on a 19-inch computer display, brought back memories of that launch and of watching Apollo launches on TV as a child. It was a bittersweet moment as the event was set against the backdrop of NASA's uncertain future.

The International Space Station's mission continues, although it will now be serviced exclusively by Soyuz capsules for the foreseeable future. NASA is reportedly developing a new five-person crew capsule to take astronauts to the space station Apollo style. Supposedly, it may also be the basis of a spacecraft that one day may head to Mars.

It seems ironic to me that the path to the future in space may be marked by a return to our past. Until the eventual end of the shuttle program was announced in 2003, I had always assumed the shuttle would be replaced by a newer, more sophisticated space plane. In retiring the space shuttle, we are also giving up a major technological capability, just as happened when the Apollo lunar missions came to an end and the Concorde supersonic airliner made its final landing. It may make a certain fiscal sense, but that doesn't mean it feels right.

I have to hold onto the hope that humanity's best days in space are still ahead of us. It just remains to be seen whether it's NASA, Russia, or an entrepreneur like Richard Branson who gets us there.



As this chapter in space exploration comes to a close, let us pause to remember the crews of Apollo I and the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, whose sacrifices have paved our way to the Final Frontier.


*My memory was faulty here. Apollo 11 landed on the moon July 20, 1969, so Atlantis was actually scheduled to return to earth on the anniversary. It would have been a nice bit of symmetry, had it happened as planned; however, the shuttle's final mission was extended by a day. Either way, it was a helluva ride!