I was at work and went outside in preparation. Sure enough, right around 5:53 am I heard the distinctive double boom.
And within seconds it was over. Forever.
Tears welled up in my eyes as I then went inside and watched News 13's coverage of the perfect landing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, only minutes later, some 30 miles away at the Kennedy Space Center.
Many want to optimistically look at the space program and say that today marks a transition to a leaner, yet more ambitious space program to come. They hold their hearts in their hand, and their hands are held out in hopes of receiving an extra crumb or two in funding their dream.
I don't think that's gonna happen. I mean look at the fix the government is in with the current debt crisis. Add in the already slashed programs to send man back to the moon and to fund the Orion projects and, well, I think we just aren't going to see it.
Oh there're those that say private enterprise will jump in to take up the mantle. I don't think so. Business interests revolve solely around profit. The profit of pure space exploration in terms of monetary payoff is chancy at best.
So with the wheels on the Space Shuttle just now cooling down for the last time, I also think human interest in space exploration will cool down over the next few years, and eventually, decades. We've proved that as a race we're still too immature to handle the responsibility of venturing to worlds beyond.
Economics and the distraction by other more worldly concerns like disease, famine, and, of course, war...let's not forget war...will evolve eventually into a lack of education and even imagination about space and its potential for the future of our species.
Too bad. So sad.
That stiff, unfluttering American flag propped on the surface of the moon 42 years ago today will eventually be buried in the gradual accumulation of moon dust over the next few eons, stifling the memory of a race of beings that slowly, but surely, extinguished its own existence by ruining the only planet they had.