The End of the Space Age
STS Atlantis is on its last roundup this week. Home it will come to the museum after that last feeble hurrah. There is a lot of crying and emotional blathering about the passing of the Space Age right now in the popular media. Most of that Age and its parts were emotion, politics, and hype. Sorry, that is the truth, not the fantasy story.
People have told me I should write a memoir about growing up in the desert, where the sadistic bully down the street tried to hang me when I was 5 and my mother happened to be home and cut me down in time, to leaving it all to go build spacecraft. That is a long book of old stories for another time, if ever. (The bully, who shot at kids with BB guns, stole from open garages, and vandalized houses, became a fireman. The American Indian across the street, who was my babysitter and went to be an Army MP in Viet Nam, was rejected by the fire department because he was an Indian. An old story.)
STS, or Space Shuttle if you prefer, never did what it was promised and soaked up all the NASA budget that ISS, International Space Station, did not get for 30 years. STS was going to be Arthur C. Clarke's geosynchronous terminated space elevator to the stars, and instead was a big expensive pickup truck to drive toilet paper, parts, and overdressed work teams to the ISS. Nobody used it much except NASA, because it was too expensive and complex to launch the workhorse spacecraft like COMSATs anyway. It was good to get more money from Congress by sending up 6-7 astronauts to launch a few high profile spacecraft like Space Telescope every now and then, but not much else.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati