“The final frontier will have to wait,” said Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press. When the space shuttle Atlantis touches down after its final mission, it will mark the end not only of the 30-year shuttle program but also of all manned U.S. spaceflight for the foreseeable future. If the United States wants to send someone into space after this weekend, we’ll have to buy him or her a ticket on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, or start “hitchhiking to the stars” with the Russians. Given that the federal government doesn’t even have enough money to sustain Social Security, said Phil Kadner in the Chicago Sun-Times, one can understand why President Obama scrapped NASA’s plans to build a giant new rocket and return to the moon. But mark my words, killing the manned space program will turn out to be a false economy. “Great nations have always done great things. When they stop trying, they stop being great.”
This is not “a grim moment, but an amazing one” for the U.S. space program, said Gareth Cook in The Boston Globe. “We just need to embrace the era of robots.” The fact is that we no longer need astronauts to explore the solar system or the stars. Look at Spirit and Opportunity, the two unmanned rovers that explored the surface of Mars for six years, at a tiny fraction of what it would have cost to send astronauts there. During the dawn of the space age, manned space flight did serve a purpose, inspiring and unifying the nation. But the cheapest, safest, and most effective way to take the next steps—looking for life on Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn—is with unmanned craft.
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