End of an era in space travel is sneaking up on Americans

This week the United States will come one step closer to one of those moments of sudden realization that are actually years in the making. The shuttle Atlantis pulled away from the International Space Station on Sunday and began preparing for it final scheduled landing Wednesday.

That leaves just two remaining scheduled flights for the shuttle fleet, one by Discovery in September, followed by Endeavour in November. After that, the shuttles will become museum pieces.

After 134 flights — most were triumphant; two, the Challenger and Columbia, were tragic — the U.S. manned space program that succeeded NASA’s lunar missions will be another part of space history.

It boggles the mind that the only nation that ever put a man on the moon isn’t sure about what it’s going to do next in manned spaceflight, aside from continue to send crew members to the ISS. The difference will be that the crews will travel by Russian rockets, not U. S. shuttles.

NASA is still doing amazing work on hundreds of fronts, from providing satellite pictures of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the Hubble telescope’s observations of a planet being devoured by its parent star. A visit to www.nasa.gov can provide hours or days of fascinating insights into our world, our solar system, our galaxy and the universe for the curious of all ages.

Reality bites

We’re betting that this summer is a minor epiphany for the American people, as realization sets in that the shuttles aren’t going to fly any more and as Congress debates NASA’s budget and spaceflight’s future.

President Barack Obama announced earlier this year that he was stepping away from the Constellation program, which was inaugurated by President George W. Bush. The program was ambitious, but its cost and how it would be funded were never clear. Putting Americans back on the moon, and then on Mars is not a task for the faint of heart or the short of cash.

Obama initially talked about a space program that would shift much of the development and cost to the private sector. Under political pressure, he has since endorsed a stripped-down version of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle—which was part of Constellation—as a lifeboat for the ISS. And he has said NASA should build a heavy-lift rocket by 2015, a program that had been stripped from the administration’s 2011 budget.

These budget debates will be watched by the American people, more than half of whom weren’t alive when Neil Armstrong took that first step onto the lunar surface in 1969. Even fewer remember President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon. And fewer still remember the near panic in the fall of 1957 when the Russians put the first man-made object into orbit around the earth, a beeping basketball sized satellite that changed the way Americans thought of themselves, science and supremacy.

Perhaps it will take another Sputnik moment to galvanize the American public. We are once again a nation that too often reacts, rather than leads. Maybe when it becomes clear that China is poised to send astronauts to the moon, even Americans who don’t remember Neil Armstrong and the men who left their footprints in the dust after him will decide it is time for action.

We’re not advocating wasting money in a false pursuit of national pride, but there is little question that the technologies developed through the U.S. space program helped make this nation the world’s leader in more areas than we can count. A lead in any race is a terrible thing to waste.