I don't know why i like watching space shuttle launches, seen one seen them all, but i made sure that i was at home today by 4.30pm to watch the launch of Atlantis to bring down the curtain on Nasa's space programme.
As expected, nothing different to every other launch i have watched on television although there was a bit of excitement when the clock stopped with 31 seconds to go.
So there it with the magnificent pictures of the earth rapidly falling away as the rocket accelerated out of the atmosphere but i can't help thinking that our Space exploration seemed to fall away after 1969.
We have the Hubble telescope and we have satellites beaming back pictures from other planets but considering the amazing leaps we made between Sputnik in 1957 and Apollo 11 in 1969, it is a bit disappointing that we haven't really kicked on.
It has been over 40 years since Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moons surface but that is still the highest pinnacle of manned space flight and our technology and understanding of space flight has improved immensely since then but still the moon is as far as we have gone.
We had a decade of collecting moon samples and then we seem to have given up on and the last time a human walked on the moon was 1972.
Of course the Cold War was the greatest driver of the Space Race and with the Soviet Union ceasing to be, the impetus to push the boundaries reduced and NASA seemed content to hang about in low earth orbit doing experiments which while very useful, never really caught the imagination.
Expense is another reason and why NASA have pulled the plug on their space programme so maybe their is an opportunity for the leading Space exploration countries America and Russia to join forces with the up and coming space programmes of China, India and the UK to join forces and have a global space exploration programme with everyone sharing the financial burden rather than individual countries.
A Moon base, manned flights to Mars and a chain of International Space Stations spreading out across our Solar System should be our aims and it shouldn't take another struggle between competing power blocks trying to prove a point before we take the next step.
2 comments:
i worked for an astronaut - john blaha - that commaned a few shuttles. thru him i also met buzz aldrin. they said that the usa took the moon mission 40 years ahead of schedule, but at a huge cost to all other aspects of space exploration. they also said that it would take 30 or 40 years to catch up in the other areas. i don't know why this information isnt made public. regardless, until other aspects of space exploration are advanced, their isnt much more that can be done...
q
Probably right, after the moon landing the next landmark must be setting foot on another planet but the technology just isn't with us for such a long duration space flight.
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