Rising to meet the next challenge

The clock was winding down for the final launch of the space shuttle Endeavour as this was being written Monday morning, the second-t0-the-last launch of an exorbitantly expensive, tragic, yet successful space program.

If all goes as planned, the shuttle will spend two weeks in orbit, delivering a partical physics experiment and another package with spare parts for a robot and other items to the International Space Station, crews performing four space walks in the process.

Once it touches down, Endeavour, the fifth shuttle built for spaceflight -- following the loss of the Challenger in 1986 -- will have a cool 115 million miles of space flight since it rolled out in 1991.

We've heard all the arguments over the years -- made many of them ourselves -- the program was too expensive, the ISS was built simply to have somewhere for the shuttle to go, using a manned vehicle to deliver hardware was unnecessarily risky and expensive, the shuttle itself was a compromise, overly complicated fragile design.

At a billion dollars a flight -- officially $450 million on average, according to NASA, but others use different figures -- it certainly is an expensive proposition.

And, with two shuttles lost in 134 flights, every flight is certainly far from routine.

But if there's one thing the space program has done, it's attracted our best and brightest, and given them challenges stretching their resolve and intelligence to its limits once they were on the job.

It's a challenge within the reach of everyone with the "right stuff," including St. Francis, Kansas, native Ron Evans, who was command module pilot on Apollo 17, the last flight to the moon, and Nebraska astronaut Clayton Anderson of Ashland, veteran of two shuttle flights.

By this point, the solid boosters had separated, the shuttle was traveling 3,200 miles per hour and was 50 miles from the launch pad, 37 miles high and well on its way to orbit.

As Shuttle Commander Mark Kelly, and husband of wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords said from the launch pad today, "It's in the DNA of our country to reach for the stars."

The main engines have now shut off and the shuttle has separated from its external tank to go into orbit.

The final flight of the space shuttle marks the end of only one means of expressing that "DNA." Meeting the challenge of the next phase is up to our national will.