29 YEARS AGO TODAY, Columbia embarked on its very first flight into space...starting a 2-day test mission that heralded the dawn of the space shuttle era. Now, this storied program is only three flights away (this excludes Discovery’s current mission on orbit) from coming to an end...leaving the International Space Station (ISS) behind as its prime legacy and paving the way for commercial launch vehicles to send NASA astronauts into orbit (which may be a bad thing depending on whether or not you supported the soon-to-be-defunct Constellation moon program, like I did) within the next few years. The last flight, STS-133 (which will be flown on Discovery), is set to launch on September 16 of this year...though it may be delayed because of current issues with the payload of STS-134: the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS. (The STS-134 flight is scheduled to launch before STS-133 for logistics reasons, on July 29.) Below is a short Youtube video chronicling Columbia’s inaugural flight from launch to landing...
If that blue ribbon panel (known as the Augustine Committee) that was appointed by President Obama last summer was correct in its assessment, then the shuttle program will conclude early next year. But assuming the hardware issues with AMS are resolved sometime this month, we’ll see Discovery’s final trip to the ISS complete the shuttle program early this fall. Which I’m hoping on. If the Augustine Committee is proven wrong with its forecast on the end of the shuttle program, then one must wonder what else it was wrong about in terms of the information it fed Obama that led him to end NASA’s moon program two months ago. Would the Ares I rocket be ready for launch by 2014-’15, as NASA stated? Or 2017...as Norm Augustine’s panel predicted? Would American astronauts have returned to the lunar surface no earlier than 2028, as this panel foretold? Or would Congress have dished out the money and provide NASA the funding that would’ve allowed it to return astronauts to Earth's only natural satellite by 2020, as originally envisioned? I know I’m getting extremely off-topic here, but the end of the shuttle era begs these questions. It remains to be seen where America’s human spaceflight program is headed...after almost 30 years of triumph and tragedy that began with Columbia’s quick stint into space in the spring of ’81.
All images and video courtesy of NASA
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