Hubble Servicing Mission #4 Options

[Stu]

You HAVE to go look at this new video... the hairs on your neck will literally stand up.

[David]

Thanks! That was fun to watch. I suspect that the actual mission, as we watch it, will be less poetic but more exciting, however.

It will be strange for the Shuttle to be going somewhere just by itself, now that I think of it. Somehow having a destination with people in it has made space feel more inviting, more like a home. Going out to somewhere where there's nobody around makes the mission feel lonelier. And of course the crew is going to be a lot more cramped spending their entire mission on the orbiter!

I don't know why, since I never liked the Shuttle too much from its earliest days (I was a child when they rolled the Columbia out -- and had so many problems getting the tiles to stay stuck) but it's begun to grow on me. Perhaps it's the additional visuals necessitated by the Columbia disaster, which have allowed the whole system to be seen in all its impressive might and grace -- perhaps it's just the fact that the Shuttle is technically just a much better machine than it was back in the 1980s. Maybe it's that the Shuttle is finally doing what it was built for -- shuttling. Whatever the reason, the fact that every single Shuttle mission brings us one step closer to the final shutdown of the whole Shuttle program is making me feel wistful. Not about the Shuttle's past glory days, because I think that the Shuttle's true glory days are now; but about the fact that there aren't going to be many more of these missions to watch, and then the launchpads at Cape Canaveral are going to go silent for what seems like a long, long time.

I was just barely too young to remember the last of the Apollo missions, which means that I spent the long years from 1975 to 1981 dreaming about space flights that I had never seen. I feel for the kids who are going to be too young to remember the Shuttle, and who are going to spend their youths wondering what the Orion-Ares is going to be like. At least they'll be able to go on the net and see the twice-yearly Soyuz launches, and maybe a Shenzhou or two. It won't be quite the same, though, and maybe they will dream about the days when the big white delta-winged bird ruled the skies.