May 30, 2011 - 9:35am
Science Savvy: The future of space travel
BY NICK CLIFT
Moments before climbing into his spaceship on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin recorded a message for the people of the world. “In the next few minutes a mighty spaceship will carry me off into the distant spaces of the universe,” he said. “All I have done and lived for has been done and lived for for this moment.” Minutes later, he became the first human in space.
As fate would have it, it was exactly twenty years later, on April 12, 1981, that the space shuttle Columbia launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on the Space Shuttle program’s maiden voyage, STS-1, the first of 133 space shuttle flights over the next 30 years. It was the birth of a program that would turn Gagarin’s rare feat into an everyday occurrence.
Manned space flight captures the imagination of the world in ways nothing else can. In November, NASA will launch a new robotic rover to the planet Mars. Yet despite being nuclear powered, the size of a small car, and equipped with a laser for shooting rocks, NASA’s new robot still won’t attract half the attention given to the humans living and working on the International Space Station just 200 miles above the surface of the Earth.
The world has an unmatchable love for human space flight and the thousands of NASA employees who made the space shuttle program a reality for 30 years know it. In just two months, the program that launched the Hubble Space Telescope and built the International Space Station will come to an end and with it, an era unlike any other in human history. Holding back tears on Tuesday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden called the shuttle program a reminder of the “great things we are capable of.” If we’re to truly honor the advances of the last fifty years, though, I think the next fifty must be made even greater.
