Back to the Future

Endeav­our is gone from Kennedy Space Cen­ter for good. It dredges up reminders of the end of the Space pro­gram in Amer­ica. To me, it’s like Back to the Future. We’ve been here before. Instead of launch­ing our astro­nauts into space using our own tech­nol­ogy, we’ve rel­e­gated them to the antique rock­etry on the other side of the plan owned by peo­ple who could never catch Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Not only is that embar­rass­ing, it’s a tremen­dous waste of tax­payer dol­lars. Those orbiters were designed to fly about 142 mis­sions into space. Then again, they were also sup­posed to fly about 50 mis­sions per year. Never got even close to that kind of sched­ule. So while the orbiters were never used as often as antic­i­pated, they were only intended to fly for 15 years. We kept extend­ing their lifes­pan, but not their usage.

I watched the first launch of Space Shut­tle Colum­bia (STS-​1) as a guest of the US Air Force. My Boy Scout troop was camp­ing in the wilder­ness sur­vival area of Patrick Air Force Base. The AF folks were kind enough to load us all on a bus and take us closer to view the launch. Mind you, we were pretty excited to go see this puppy launch, since it was some­thing new. As it creeped up into the sky, I couldn’t help but think “Damn, this thing is slow!“Compared to the Apollo mis­sions on Sat­urn V rock­ets, the Shut­tle was a lum­ber­ing space truck. Of course, a space truck was exactly what we needed.

The thing that peo­ple need to remem­ber is some­thing I’ve often heard com­mented in the Defense indus­try. Pro­grams end. Noth­ing is meant to live for­ever, and pro­grams rarely have the life that their cre­ators envi­sioned. So now our Shut­tle Orbiters will end up like this lunar lan­der — mounted on dis­play as part of our his­tory, places were we travel back in time and rem­i­nisce about the good ol’ days. Once we remem­ber that some of those good ol’ days weren’t always as good as we remem­bered, then it’s time to get back to the future.

It’s just that nobody told us the future would be a place where we dropped the ball and let some­one else pick up the lead.