Last June, I shared my excitement about submitting a photo of the Astronomy magazine staff to NASA’s “Face in Space” website so we could vicariously fly aboard space shuttle Endeavor on STS-134, the final mission of the U.S. space shuttle program. At the time, that flight was scheduled for November 2010.
Well, the intervening 10 months since my post have witnessed not only repeated delays in that mission’s launch, but also the addition of another flight. Atlantis will now conclude the shuttle program with mission STS-135, currently scheduled to launch June 28.
Yesterday, April 4, NASA issued a press release stating that due to a scheduling conflict with a Russian supply vehicle headed to the International Space Station, STS-134 is now rescheduled for launch 3:47 p.m. EDT on Friday, April 29. The very next paragraph of that release, however, states that NASA will hold a Flight Readiness Review April 19 and, at the end of that meeting, select an “official launch date.” Smart money says you needn’t cancel any plans for the afternoon of April 29 to watch the shuttle lift off, but who knows.
Now, lest you think I’m complaining, I’m not. First, I vividly recall the terrible losses of shuttles Challenger and Columbia, so I heartily endorse any delay necessary to get it right, even the administrative kind. But second, and more importantly, it struck me the other day that once “my flight” and STS-135 happen, that’s it. The regular presence of the United States in space — and all of the important implications that has carried politically, technologically, and inspirationally since the 1960s — will cease.
As a kid in the mid-1970s, I religiously scanned our daily newspaper for the slightest mention of the shuttle Enterprise, the orbiter prototype subjected to a battery of tests on the ground and in the air to validate the entire Space Transportation System (the basis of the “STS” acronym). Somewhere in my parents’ attic, I suspect the scrapbooks I created from those clippings still reside, forgotten and perhaps quaint in an age of the Internet and Google. In 1981, I daydreamed about being John Young, commander of Columbia during STS-1 and one of the dozen people to tread the lunar surface.
Sure, like most of the country, I’ve since taken the shuttle program for granted, unfortunately growing to view each launch as routine instead of the phenomenal technologic achievement it is. But now, facing the mortality of the Space Transportation System, coupled with President Obama’s cancellation of the Constellation program and a shift to commercial vehicles, I realize I don’t mind this latest delay, er ... extension of the shuttle program. So, again I say, NASA, please keep delaying the launch of STS-134.