I'm sitting here right now contemplating never seeing another manned NASA mission. Its quite a sobering thought. Since the early days of Mercury through Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle the manned missions have been with us for 50 years, longer than I have been alive (just). With no replacement currently in sight and even the best of the commercial carriers not yet ready to step up to the plate, America has lost the capability to put humans into space.
The shuttle programme had a troubled birth. Teetering on the edge of cancellation since its inception. It finally made it only because it underwent a major redesign, enlarging it to make it capable of carrying spy satellites into orbit meaning it could get funding from the defence budget.
And yet this craft built the International Space Station. It launched and then repaired the Hubble space telescope as well as launching countless other satellites and conducting many experiments. It was ageing and needed replacing. it was never the perfect spacecraft but, then again, it was built by the lowest bidder. To cancel it with no replacement in sight is crazy.
Its not just shuttle and its not just America. Today we are told that gas and electricity bills are set to rise again due to having to buy gas on the world market. Last year Professor Brian Cox presented an Horizon programme called Can we make a star on Earth. In this programme we found out clean, safe fusion energy is less than a few decades away and yet he stated in his programme that more money gets spent on ringtones every year than has been invested in fusion. Am I the only one that sees something wrong with this picture?
Why can we find money to bomb yet another middle eastern country, to bail out another self serving irresponsible banking group but we cannot find the money to invest in the technologies that will make a difference. The Apollo programme alone pulled in far more Dollars than was ever spent on it and yet it was forced to scrape by on hand out after hand out.
There is something fundamentally wrong in our society when it prides the financial gains of a few greedy capitalists over the scientific advances that have been made by people who have to beg for grants just to survive.
In conclusion I wish the crew of Atlantis well and hope this final mission is the success it deserves to be. To the politicians and policy makers I say with out science and scientific advancement we are heading for a new dark age and you are the instigators of the fall.
Thank you for your time