The End of One Era…

The Beginning of Another

Three years ago today, we watched the last space shuttle launch. Orbiter Atlantis roared up to space, thrilling and saddening all of us who had gathered at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (and beyond) to watch it. Several weeks before that, we had flown to Florida to watch the last launch of Endeavour. Both times we made videos of the experience, capturing for ourselves and our friends the experience of watching a shuttle launch. You can see them both below.

The final launch of Atlantis – fulldome from Loch Ness Productions on Vimeo.

The Final Launch of Endeavour from Loch Ness Productions on Vimeo.

Okay, so now that shuttles have been history for three years (and have taken their places in various museum exhibits), what’s next on the horizon? In truth, we’re still exploring space, just not with regular shuttle launches to l0w-Earth orbit.

Space exploration is a huge topic, and there are many variations on the theme. Of course, we have orbiting observatories such as Hubble Space Telescope, ESA’s Herschel, and many others looking in all directions of the cosmos and returning excellent data and images. There are also the planetary missions, ranging from flybys of Mercury and Pluto to rovers and orbiters at Mars, and the long-standing Cassini mission to Saturn. Past world-exploring missions have taken our attention to Venus, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, not to mention asteroids and comets.

Right now, human missions are pretty much limited to trips to the International Space Station. That’s all fine and good, but people are itching to get to other worlds, to get on with the larger business of getting to the stars. The Moon is a good start, and there are plans on the drawing boards of several countries to land people there in the coming years. How soon? Well, that’s TBD. I’ve read of a private mission by Space Adventures to fly tourists on orbits around the Moon, possibly in two years. The first official governmental missions may come from the U.S. sometime near 2020, as well as from India and Japan. Only the U.S. crewed test of the Orion multi-purpose  is semi-scheduled, the rest are proposed.

I’ve read (and talked) about planned missions to Mars by such groups as Mars One, which has an elaborate plan to send robotic missions to build up a habitat before the humans get there. I like their idea, I hope they get the money to do it. I wish I could go with them. Mars is the next big frontier, and the more missions we send there, the merrier. Certainly we’ve been doing our homework ahead of time with the surface rovers and orbiting mappers. The MAVEN mission, set to arrive at Mars later this year, will give us an important look at the Martian atmosphere, which is an important factor in figuring out habitability not just for astronauts but for any prior life that could have existed on the Red Planet.

Beyond Mars, the future is hazy. There are discussions and drawing-board plans for missions to Europa (Jupiter’s icy ocean moon), but that’s about it. For the time being, unless there’s a huge breakthrough (and we get warp technology, for example), missions to the stars are still in the realm of science fiction. To do them, we would likely need generation-spanning ships because the humans who leave Earth on such trips are not the ones who’ll be landing on exoplanets. Their umpty-ump great-grandchildren will be the first explorers on such a world. But, I wouldn’t put it past humans to figure out a way to do it faster and better than the current technology.

So, the legacy of the orbiters is a future in space. Atlantis, Endeavour and their sister ships accomplished a lot. I hope that we don’t let those accomplishments lie fallow for long, and that future generations will look back at them as one of the first steps to space, not the last.