The End Of An Era

The Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off today on its- and the shuttle program's final mission. Pundits around the country have been talking nonstop today about what it means and what might come next...

Rand Simberg has a double shot of thoughts here and here.

Instapundit Guru Extraordinaire Glenn Reynolds has thoughts here.

The Economist has some thoughts here- including rather gloomily predicting 'the end of the space age.'

I can honestly say that I've got mixed feelings about the shuttle. Part of me thinks that it kept us too confined to low earth orbit for much of the past three decades- and the International Space Station just came into being to give the shuttle something to do. I mean, mad props for fixing the Hubble and building the space station, but what happened to the moon? What happened to Mars? At the end of the day, demographics is destiny and there are increasingly more and more humans and less and less room here on Earth. At a certain point, we're going to strain our natural resources to the point where more room is going to become a necessity. Plus, if we get ourselves onto a second planet we can truly ensure the survival of our species. Right now, if the asteroid from Armageddon comes calling, we're totally screwed- and thousands of years of civilization will vanish and no one will care.

You can argue about 'if we can put a man on the moon, we can stamp out world hunger' until you're blue in the face, but the fact is that the technological effects of the space program were unknown until we went to the Moon. Velcro, the microwave, tang and a whole generation of math and science geeks later we had the answer. Who knows what technology we could develop if we went to Mars? And another generation of math and science geeks is only going to help us catch up in the race for innovation and new technologies- which we're starting to lose now that immigrants we've relied on for decades have increasing lucrative offers back home. So people may see it as a total drain or a waste of time, but I think we won't know what technology we're going to get until we go- and inspiring a generation of kids to dig into math, science, engineering and computers is something that can only benefit everyone in the long run. Albeit in ways that probably seem pretty abstract from where we're sitting today.