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Editorial
Shuttle's greatest achievement has been cooperation
Friday, July 8, 2011
The space shuttle never lived up to its promise as a safe, reliable, cheap means of carrying people and equipment into orbit, but those of us who remember the first, tentative steps off the planet can't help but feel a sense of awe and wonder at today's final launch of Atlantis.
Weather was still the big question as this was being written, with the chance of a scheduled mid-morning launch estimated at 30 percent.
We remember watching a black-and-white image of the gleaming Columbia making its first trip, April 12, 1981. Atlantis' launch, whenever it comes, is the 135th and final of the series.
We'll allow the shuttle commander, Chris Ferguson, to have a biased opinion: "We have done fantastic things in space. We've brought the globe together in space in the form of the International Space Station, where we formerly had these conglomerates in Russia and Europe, Japan, the United States, that had their independent space programs, but we've managed to bring them all together so we speak a common language," he said. "The interfaces all work together. We all did that because we agreed to cooperate internationally on the space station."
NASA itself makes the same point in today's releases.
"Since the space shuttle's maiden voyage ... 355 individuals will have flown 852 times on 135 flights. Sixteen countries have been represented on shuttle missions: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States.
"The five space shuttle orbiters -- Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour -- have flown 537,114,016 miles so far, and STS-135 is expected to add more than four million miles to that total.
"The shuttles have docked to two space stations: the Russian Mir space station and the International Space Station. Between 1994 and 1998, nine missions flew to Mir; with STS-135, 37 shuttle missions will have flown to the International Space Station."
Yes, the shuttle is expensive, fragile and more dangerous than a space vehicle has to be.
But as a model of international cooperation, it has been worth it.