Here is a complete post from Plane Talking. I tried to just quote fragments - didn't work. Ben's post exactly mirrors my thoughts, so here is the whole thing.
The last Space Shuttle and some bitter thoughts.
"Amid the close local focus on airline affairs in Australia this week the last Space Shuttle has been launched into orbit, where it will dock at the International Space Station.
It is for this writer, a bitter moment, a moment when the US space program confronts the optimism with which, like so many, I saw the first satellites and their final stage rockets glide through the fields of stars, believing that in my lifetime the first manned interstellar missions might set forth, never mind see the establishment of bases on the moon, Mars and perhaps an asteroid.
The promises of space travel were first spoken for this writer at a time when the great ocean liners carried far more passengers than aeroplanes, and even in this country, it had been but a short time since Vickers Viscounts and Douglas DC6Bs could routinely fly over the Snowy Mountains between Sydney and Melbourne, rather than past them, as had been the then recent case with DC4 Skymasters.
As a 'half' American, the sorrow is somewhat deeper too. Transport systems are creations of social, economic and political change. They facilitate mobility, wealth, knowledge and experience, and from an airliner, or a space craft, no borders are visible.
But when a society retreats into itself, as I see happening in my experience of America, and I see starting to happen in these mean spirited times in Australia, then these simple dreams of younger days crumble and fade.
Transport in America is in disarray, whether by road, rail or air, and this is true of its innovations in space transport in particular, which are no longer considered useful to a society where the anti-science tendency actually translates into political power, where the country is insolvent, and an angry sense of denied entitlement and bewilderment seems to infuse many of those in its major parties.
There is some reason to be optimistic that the rise of privately funded space transport companies will nurture talent and innovation. But on a day when the last Shuttle has lifted off, those ventures seem like candles fluttering in the wind."
Verum audaces non gerunt indusia alba. - Ipsi dixit MCMLXXII
