Endeavour’s Last Endeavour
No, this is not a blogpost about Inspector Morse’s last case. I am referring to the other famous ‘Endeavour’, the space shuttle, which landed at Cape Canaveral on June 1, marking NASA’s penultimate shuttle mission. Space shuttle Atlantis will make the final flight on July 8, bringing an end to a 30-year odyssey. Another noteworthy milestone passed by recently when the world marked the 50th anniversary of the first manned spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin.
With the US shuttle programme at an end, America will be reliant on Russia’s rocket fleet to send people to the International Space Station, at least until the shuttle replacement vehicle is inaugurated. How ironic, given that the US won the Cold War and is the more advanced economic and technological power. The Soviet space shuttle Buran, which looked so similar to its American counterpart, only had one unmanned flight, in 1988.
Part of the problem for the US is the sheer cost of the shuttle replacement programme. I will ignore the retort, ‘Can you afford not to have a new space shuttle?’ Fiscal consolidation on earth means sacrifices in the heavens.
In many ways, I suspect that observers of the US’s and USSR’s early space efforts in the 1960s would be disappointed by how little progress there has been made in space exploration since then. There have not been any manned missions to Mars or other planets, there are no lunar bases, and there is only one space station. Sci-fi authors were way too optimistic in predicting many of these by the year 2000.
Going forward, as with so many things nowadays, the baton of progress in space may well be passed to China – and perhaps also India – over the coming decades. Other emerging markets, such as South Korea, Brazil, and even Iran will increasingly be reaching into the cosmos.
Endeavour and Atlantis may be retiring, but their successors will not be far behind.