Science Features

Shuttle's tearful end leaves question: What's next?

By Anne K Walters Jul 22, 2011, 12:03 GMT

The Atlantis returned to Earth marking the end of the space shuttle era when its wheels touched down for the last time at the Kennedy Space Centre. " EPA/PIERRE DUCHARME POOL

Washington - The closing of the curtain on a 30-year-era in human space flight was a bittersweet time for NASA to take a bow, even as it mourned the loss of an old friend.

The first shuttle, Columbia, began that era in April 1981 with a two-day flight. It ended as Atlantis' wheels touched down for the final time before dawn at Kennedy Space Centre, after a nearly two-week mission to deliver crucial supplies to the International Space Station.

Shuttle astronauts, engineers and technicians seemed tried to savour the moment.

'I found myself just standing back and admiring the beauty of the vehicle,' shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach said. 'I saw grown men and grown women crying today - tears of joy to be sure. That was just human emotions came out on the runway, and you couldn't suppress them.'

NASA hopes that the end of the 30-year shuttle era will also be seen as the dawn of a new age in human spaceflight - one in which the US space agency is free to shift its focus away from low-Earth toward asteroids and Mars, but with those goals still distant the agency has come under harsh criticism.

A group of esteemed astronauts from the 1960s even publicly called on the agency to keep the shuttle running, calling the retirement a mistake and future plans too vague.

NASA officials insisted that Atlantis' landing did not mark the end of US involvement in space.

'I want to send American astronauts where we've never been before, by focusing our resources on exploration and innovation, while leveraging private-sector support to take Americans to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit,' NASA chief Charles Bolden said after the landing.

'Children who dream of being astronauts today may not fly on the space shuttle, ... but one day they may walk on Mars.'

The shuttle is 'what has enabled us to say we've got to focus on going beyond Earth's orbit,' said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate NASA administrator for space operations.

But there was little hope that NASA could find the money develop a next-generation spacecraft while still operating the shuttle.

Facing tight budgets for the foreseeable future, President Barack Obama killed plans by his predecessor George W Bush to build a spacecraft to return to the moon. Instead, he wants NASA to focus on building a rocket that can take astronauts into deeper space and cede to commercial firms much of the routine work of ferrying astronauts into low-Earth orbit.

Commercial companies in the United States are already working to develop spacecraft, changing the model of government-owned spacecraft in favour of private enterprise.

Ten years from now, Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson believes US astronauts will regularly be riding into low-Earth orbit on a commercial vessel, and NASA's heavy-lift, long-distance vehicle will have made a flight - or at least be very close.

'Right now is a time of mourning, if you will,' he told reporters. 'Once you get over that, you'll start looking forward and make it happen again.'

In the meantime, all astronauts will have to hitch a ride on the Russian Soyuz craft for the foreseeable future at a cost of some 55 million dollars per seat through 2014, and even more after that. Those rides on the Soyuz are a critical piece of keeping alive the shuttle's living legacy in the International Space Station.

Early shuttle flights focussed on satellite delivery and later on cooperation in space with post-Soviet Russia. The last decade has revolved largely around building the ISS and moving toward a more permanent presence in space.

Now that the shuttle is gone for good, the ISS will become the centerpiece of space flight, with astronauts focussed on using the orbiting laboratory for science. Current plans ensure that will happen through at least 2020.

As if to remind NASA what was come, the orbiting ISS was visible acrss the sky over Florida just minutes before Atlantis landed.

Though the ISS may not have the wow-factor of a shuttle launch, Gerstenmaier notes that 'this little white dot going over the horizon' will propel humans into 'the next phase' in space.