NASA / Michael Fossum
WELCOME HOME, ATLANTIS! And just like that...a 30-year-old human spaceflight program comes to an end. At 2:56 AM, Pacific Daylight Time today, NASA’s last remaining orbiter soared through the night sky and touched down at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Left behind as the shuttle’s legacy is a venerable observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, that has been in orbit gazing at the cosmos since 1990 and an orbiting outpost the size of a football field, the International Space Station (ISS), flying 220 miles above the Earth. Atlantis will find her final resting home at the KSC Visitor Complex sometime next year...while U.S. astronauts will find their next ride to the ISS onboard Russian Soyuz vehicles around that same time. NASA’s shuttle replacement, the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, isn’t set to become operational till 2016. Let’s hope that when it does fly, Orion will pave the way for a new and historic era for NASA...with hopeful legacies for the capsule including a trip to an asteroid in 2025, as President Obama has promised, and a long-awaited journey to the Red Planet years later.
It remains to be seen what the future will hold now that Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis have concluded their careers in triumphant fashion. I hope this future will be as noteworthy (if not obviously more) as what has transpired for our human spaceflight program over the past three decades. Carry on.
NASA / Tony Gray
NASA / Kim Shiflett
NASA / Kim Shiflett
No comments:
Post a Comment