The Last Journey of Space Shuttle Atlantis

The last journey of Atlantis has started with great attention of the whole world.Now read  the whole story of  Atlantis.There was a time, some of us remember, when a countdown at Canaveral stopped the world in its tracks. On television or at the launching, every breath was held at liftoff and every eye followed the fiery plume of ascent, up and away. Godspeed, said someone who was everyone.

That was a half century ago, when men first squeezed into their machines and, defying gravity, rode into a new dimension of human experience. Unbound to Earth, our species could imagine that an age of spacefaring was truly under way, the Moon and Mars within reach, maybe even an asteroid where the Little Prince awaited our visit. The promised new reality legitimized fantasies.

The atmosphere here on Friday at the launching of the space shuttle Atlantis was, in some respects, reminiscent of the old days. The crowd was the largest in years, attracted by the last chance for no telling how long to see astronauts in this country leave for space.

Everything was class-reunion festive. The gray-hairs recharged memories from youth. Their grandchildren trooped along to see what had turned people on when there were just a few channels of black-and-white TV and the only telephone in the house was at the end of a cord — and the only ones twittering were sparrows. 

As rain clouds hovered ominously and the countdown began to the 135th departure in the 30-year-old shuttle program, the milling crowd grew still and anxious. There was concern for the four lives in the winged space plane, of course, and all eyes searched for the break in the clouds that finally came. But this time, more than ever, spectators and others who care about NASA worried for nothing less than the future of human spaceflight in the United States.

“We’ve come full circle since 1961, back to when we had yet to show we could launch people into space,” said Steven J. Dick, a retired NASA chief historian. “We will be hitching rides from the Russians to go to the space station that is mainly ours.”

The irony of having to send our astronauts up in Russian Soyuz capsules is as plain as cold war history. The Soviet Union’s early dominance of space, manifested by the Sputnik surprise in 1957 and subsequent feats, prompted the United States to match and then surpass the Soviets in a program topped off by the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969. Human spaceflight would have come along anyway, but not with quite the urgency of the Soviet-American competition.

Foreseeing the end of shuttle flights, the Obama administration and NASA last year proposed new plans, approved by Congress, to develop heavy-lift rockets for sending people deeper into space, to be ready perhaps after 2020. Meanwhile, NASA has begun financing research for intermediate crew-only spacecraft to be produced and launched by commercial companies, probably no sooner than 2016. Such plans, of course, are at the mercy of the budget cutting and government downsizing spreading in Washington.

Lori B. Garver, the deputy administrator of NASA, insisted this week that the future was bright for human spaceflight. “We are tapping into how we developed almost everything great in this country, through commercial enterprise and competition,” Ms. Garver said.

Other NASA officials noted that Congressional support for the new programs was bipartisan. But they acknowledged that budget cuts were possible, and would ultimately take a toll on launching capabilities.

John M. Logsdon, a space policy expert and the author of “John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon,” said there had been gaps in human flight before, especially after Apollo flights ended in 1975 and the first shuttles flew in 1981. “We can accept that as long as a replacement is in the pipeline,” Dr. Logsdon said. “But we are ending programs with no sure follow-ons.”

Dr. Dick, the historian, questioned whether the barely started new programs would be ready to boost this country’s astronauts into orbit in this decade. “We’re stuck in the short term, can’t rouse ourselves to do much that’s inspiring,” he said.

Whatever happened to the space age as imagined back in the 1950s and early ’60s, when science fiction writers and rocket scientists spun tales of travel out in the solar system and beyond? Propellants, oxygen and other good stuff never seemed limited, or radiation a risk, or Congressional budgets a curse. This alternate universe appealed to some in a society flush with confidence after winning the Second World War but feeling a bit confined in the postwar gray-flannel conformity. Americans seemed to have lost none of their can-do spirit.