"They're in the process of 'safetying' the vehicle, as they call it," said Bill Harwood, a CBS News space analyst for the past 20 years. The Endeavor is in space right now, on its final mission it lands on Wednesday for the last time.ĭiscovery lifted off for the final time in February. The Atlantis is set for its final flight in July. You know, the existence of commercial airline services does not mean we don't have military cargo transports. "It may be one where NASA simply buys commercial launch services, or it may be that NASA decides that it really does need to have a government-owned and operated vehicle. Pace isn't sure NASA will ever send another manned rocket into space. Now he's the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "The commercial cargo delivery systems are not yet ready commercial crew vehicles are several years, even farther away," said Scott Pace, who used to work for NASA. Still, as the shuttle retires, NASA's manned space program is at a crossroads. "The president has told us he wants us to rendezvous with and put astronauts in the vicinity of an asteroid in 2025." "We could conceivably put a human on the surface of Mars in 2030," Bolden said.
"So we need a smaller, more compact vehicle than the winged vehicle we have today."Īqs a backup to our Russian rides, NASA has hired commercial spacecraft companies to build a space shuttle replacement, so NASA can focus on more ambitious missions. "We need more of a smaller capsule that can take that heat, of coming back from those larger destinations with a higher re-entry velocity," he told Pogue. It's because the next missions require different designs to go into deeper space, like the Orion capsule that NASA just unveiled. The Shuttle's complexity was also responsible for its two far more traumatic failures: the Challenger disaster in 1986, and the disintegration of the Columbia in 2003 - terrible accidents that killed everyone on board.īut for better or worse, in good times and bad, the shuttle was a symbol of American technical superiority, the unmistakable icon of a nation on the rise.īut NASA's William Gerstenmaier says the shuttle isn't ending because we've lost our mojo. Then two hours before blastoff, NASA discovered a glitch, and delayed the launch for two weeks. we were all psyched for that historic moment.
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