Discovery's Final Flight, With Bonus Robonaut

Exactly 24 hours from now—assuming the old gal gets her voltage irregularities sorted out—the space shuttle Discovery will make its final voyage, with six astronauts and one robonaut aboard. The astronauts will come home, the robonaut will stay aboard the International Space Station. With only one more flight planned before the entire shuttle fleet is decommissioned, now's as good a time as any to review why it's long past time to let NASA's shuttle program wheeze to a finish, and exciting new private options to step into the breach. 

First Woodshed on the Moon: NASA wants you to pay $104 billion for its mistakes, by Ted Balaker | October 4, 2005.

With all the post-Katrina buck-passing, it's rather refreshing to hear a high ranking official admit fault. When he spoke with USA TODAY's editorial staff last week, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin didn't blame himself for his agency's woes, but he did something perhaps even more startling. He agreed that most of what NASA has been doing for the past few decades—the shuttle program and the International Space Station—has been a mistake.

Back To Space: NASA fights the future, by Tim Cavanaugh | February 3, 2003.

Among the major science projects handled during this flight (not counting the familiar zero-gravity tests on ants, spiders, and bees dreamed up by schoolkids in the US, China, and Australia and performed on the shuttle for public relations purposes), there appear to be few if any items of burning import….The Columbia astronauts studied the effects of zero gravity on prostate cancer cells, produced flame balls ("the weakest forms of fire ever produced"), and examined how moss responds to light and gravity.

If these experiments were conducted by, say, the Department of the Interior or a federally funded college lab—that is, if they were removed from the context of national service and heroism space travel endows—they would be scoffed at as a waste of taxpayer dollars, recited in get-a-load-of-this tones by members of congress who occasionally enjoy criticizing obscure and apparently valueless public science projects. (To anybody who accuses me of disrespecting the recently deceased, I throw the question back: Is expanding the base of knowledge about flame balls worth risking seven lives?)

The Men Who Sold the Moon: Advertising the early space race, by Brian Doherty | October 2010.

Space's place in the public imagination may be in low orbit, but the real space age is just beginning. The government bureaucracy and military-industrial complex so stylishly sold in this book may have been the thrust that gave launch energy to man's travels off planet. But a new steering system is emerging for the greatest voyage in human history.

NASA: An $18.9 Billion Self-Esteem Program by Michael C. Moynihan | July 6, 2010.

I will leave it to other staffers to denounce NASA as a wasteful boondoggle, a budget-chewing vestige of the Cold War (I trust this is the case, though admit to having little interest in the celestial). What limited knowledge of space exploration I possess, sadly, comes from David Bowie and The Only Ones. But I do know this: the United States space program now exists to assuage the hurt feelings of nations and cultures that have lagged behind the United States in scientific development.

Extra bonus: Check out this creepily prescient and conspiracy-fodder-providing piece by Gregg Easterbrook from 1980: Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty: 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 … Goodbye, Columbia.