For three decades, the Space Shuttle has been the pride of NASA’s manned spaced flight fleet. But the end of U.S. manned missions is in sight with the final launch scheduled for June 28 and the next and also second-to-last mission scheduled to launch April 19. The outdated shuttle will be retired afterwards.
“It’s unfortunate that we won’t have any manned space missions for now,” junior Alex Docobo said. “We should keep pushing our frontiers in space and resume manned space flights as soon as possible.”
Throughout its thirty-year career, the U.S. shuttle fleet has had its triumphs and its downfalls. The original fleet contained five shuttles: Discovery, Endeavor, Atlantis, Columbia and Challenger. But the outcomes of the Challenger explosion caused by a faulty fuel tank, and the failed reentry of the Columbia due to a small defect in the shuttle’s heat shield, plagued the shuttle fleets’ career and has led to controversy concerning space flight. The shuttle program has faced constant threats from shutdown due to its relatively poor safety record, and criticism of the NASA program from government and the general populace.
“I’m glad that they are shutting down the shuttle program,” freshman Jack Weger said. “It’s kind of a waste of tax money that could be spent somewhere else.”
Despite all the drawbacks the space shuttle program has encountered, it still holds its share of outstanding accomplishments.
“It was an amazing, and is an amazing, spacecraft, amazing flying machine, and the many accomplishments that it’s made throughout its history, I think stand for themselves,” NASA astronaut Ron Garan said. “Whether it’s deploying the Hubble Space Telescope, repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, building the space station, all the satellites it launched, all the satellites it recovered, all the scientific experiments that were conducted on board, I think it, I am, I am really proud to have flown on the space shuttle and to be a part of the space shuttle program.”
On the next launch, scheduled for April 19, the shuttle Endeavor will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station along with some other spare parts.
The last launch of the space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled for June 28 and is supposed to deliver the final laboratory to the space station before the fleet is retired, marking the end of the shuttle era and United States manned space flight for now.
