Never again will I see the shuttle docked to ISS. ISS itself serves as a reminder of how far we came. The greatest accomplishment of the shuttle for manned spaceflight was allowing us to learn how to build and maintain an immense structure in orbit.
ISS may not be the first space station by any means, but it is by far the largest and most complex. The challenges we faced were the most valuable part of the whole station program, and the shuttle’s crowning achievement imho.
When the shuttle program started, many people had serious doubts about our ability to safely conduct the amount of spacewalks that would be necessary to build a station of that size. We’ve now mastered extremely complex and lengthy spacewalks, and tremendously improved their safety by developing an emergency suit propulsion system. Best of all, we’ve proven we can build large, complex spacecraft in orbit. That may seem like stating the obvious, but when the shuttle started no one really knew for sure if it could be done. By 2007, the shuttle had accumulated more than 100 spacewalks, and additional walks were initiated from the space station that it helped build. The total time spent performing space station EVAs is now in excess of 1000 hours, 42 days straight over 160 EVAs. That would have seemed insurmountable pre-shuttle. Even when these plans were being laid out, they called it the “EVA wall.” We’ve now scaled that wall and learned a tremendous amount from it.
Before shuttle, the US had accomplished a grand total of 39 spacewalks from Gemini through Skylab, and almost half of those were done on the surface of the moon, not free floating in space.
Was it worth the money and lives lost? I suppose that all depends on what we decide to do with the knowledge and experience we gained. If we let it die here, then those lives were mostly lost in vain. If we continue orbital construction of complex vehicles and bases, then I would argue it was all worth it.
One day, sooner or later, we will find an asteroid with a high risk of impact, and when that happens it will take multiple launches with the same construction techniques learned here in order to build something capable of diverting it. This is not just about exploration and eventual resource utilization, though that’s certainly a big factor, it’s about defense as well.
In the years to come, when I look up and see the space station without the shuttle ever docked to it, it will remind me of what’s at stake, and how everything we learned is at risk of being lost.
Farewell Atlantis, it was good to see you up there one last time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgoVGWazev8
“Never again will I see the shuttle docked to ISS. ISS itself serves as a reminder of how far we came. The greatest accomplishment of the shuttle for manned spaceflight was allowing us to learn how to build and maintain an immense structure in orbit.”
EXCELLENT points! The ISS would not have been possible without the shuttle. The Hubble telescope (and repairs to it) would not have been possible without the shuttle. Lots of people considered what the shuttle did as boring and mundane compared to the Apollo program or sending people to Mars. But something like that is necessary if we want to construct things in space. I think of the gargantuan “space docks” the Enterprise pulled into for repairs/refits in the Star Trek movies. I imagine it took something like our space shuttles to build them. Heck, I imagine it took space shuttles to build the Enterprise starship itself.