Godspeed, STS-135

The weather is still the wild card for the final launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, scheduled to go off a little more than an hour from now.  There's been a lot of press nostalgia of late about how today marks the "end of an era" but not nearly enough about the United States becoming a second-rate space power with the Shuttle program's demise.  Here's some thoughts in that space (heh) from a CNet article today:

"Does it bother me? I think the transition could have taken place a little more gradually," (STS-135 commander Craig) Ferguson said of the Obama space policy. "I would have liked to have seen a little more openness and not have it occur so suddenly. Does that mean it's the wrong thing to do? I'm really not sure. We had alluded to, in the past, we're really taking a risk. We are. And with big risks come big rewards. This could turn out to be the savior of human spaceflight in America. I'm really not sure, only time will tell.

[...]

"We are going to miss it," former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, architect of the Bush administration's moon program, said of the shuttle program. "I was, as administrator, supportive of and willing to retire the shuttle in favor of a new and better system that would take us back to the moon and even beyond, but I'm not willing to retire the shuttle in favor of nothing. That, to me, doesn't seem like good national policy."

 

In the near term, "we're going to have a reverse brain drain," he told CBS News. "It used to be that people came from other places and other industries to work in the space program because of what it meant and what it was. And as it goes away, we're going to lose those people because talented folks go where there are tough problems. And that's not going to be good for the country."

There's more here, including excerpts from a highly critical open letter to President Obama written by Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong, Apollo 13 commander James Lovell, and Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan.

It's gonna be an emotional day.  Godspeed, STS-135.