Erstellt am: 21. 7. 2011 - 16:34 Uhr

The final frontier?

The space shuttle programme comes to an end, but what did it achieve and what comes next?

The final touchdown

When the space shuttle Atlantis landed today, it marked the end of the 30 year programme that has seen some great achievements but also some horrific losses. Looking back, was it worth it? Has it paved the way to the future, or closed the chapter of US space travel that began in the 1950s?

As a child of the space race, I must confess to being a little sentimental about it. My first pin-up was Yuri Gagarin, and in 1968, at the tender age of 10, as I watched avidly as Niel Armstrong first set foot on the moon I was something of an expert in the Apollo programme. But unbeknown to the average space geek like me, behing all the glitz and glamour of the moon shots, the forerunners of the shuttle were already being planned.

Fact following fiction, or vice versa?

In Stanley Kubrik's classic 1968 film, 2001, A Space Odyssey, a shuttle was envisaged that wasn't that far off what we actually ended up with. The main difference was that Kubrik (and his co-writer, Arthur C. Clarke) anticipated a commercial shuttle taking people to a sort of 5 star hotel in space, rather than a government agency run transport to a scientific station, but the design was pretty close. Maybe they knew something the rest of us didn't.

The 70s brought international cooperations and link ups in space, but it wasn't until 1981 that the shuttle Columbia undertook the first test flight for what would turn out to be a total of 134 shuttle missions spanning 30 years. Just as Kubrick and Clarke had envisaged, it was a type of space plane.

People not over the moon

The first few missions were headline news and brought some dramatic photos, but soon the shuttle didn't capture the public imagination the way the moon programme had. Many people saw it as little more than an expensive bus service to take scientists and astronauts up to space stations, initially the Soviet/ Russian station, Mir, and later the International Space Station. But that is to greatly demean the shuttle's importance.

The unsung hero

Reality Check spoke to shuttle astronaut, Michel Tognini, who says the ISS could never have been built without the very particular features of the shuttle. Its robotic arm, combined with the robotic arm of the ISS, enabled the station and its facilities to be fitted together like a giant lego set.

The shuttle was also essential to the Hubble space telescope, launching it in 1990 and enabling it to be serviced in the following decades. The Hubble has given us insights into the workings of the universe that would never have been possible from an earth based telescope.

Another potentially highly significant achievement of the shuttle is that it has allowed us to find out about living and working in space for extended periods - something that will be essential if we are to explore further away destinations. There's also the new field of space tourism, which has yet to take off, so to speak - mostly due to the high price.

A high price for a nice view?

Estimates vary, but it's generally estimated that the shuttle programme has cost around 209 billion dollars. Critics say it wasn't worth it. Some say these resources should have gone into taking us further into space, or even back to the moon. Some say it could have been better spend on humanitarian causes on earth. We should also not forget the two shuttle tragedies and the lives of 14 astronauts lost when Challenger exploded shortly after launch in 1986, and Columbia disintegrated during re-entry into the earth's atmosphere in 2003.

Although President Obama is talking of manned missions to Mars and to asteroids, it's unclear if or when such projects will get underway. For the people in the shuttle programme losing their jobs today, it may all come too late as they will be seeking positions in other fields.

It must also be a little embarrassing to President Obama that the future trips to take people to the International Space Station will be made by Russian Soyuz spacecraft - a design from the 1960s that is still in service today. NASA says a shuttle mission costs around 450 million dollars. I can't find clear price for Soyuz, but estimates are around the 80 million dollars. It's a little reminiscent of the anecdote that the US spend millions of dollars developing a ball point pen that would write in zero gravity for their astronauts to fill in their paperwork in space. The Russians solved the same problem by giving their cosmonauts a supply of pencils.

Astronaut Michel Tognini is, however, confident that space exploration will continue and that new spacecraft will be designed for the new missions. The shuttle, he says, is not suitable for the needs of the future. "The space shuttle cannot land on the moon, it cannot land on Mars, so we need a different type of vehicle. It's like when you have a very nice car, at one point you have to change your car, even if you love it, to buy a car that has better requirements for what you want."

You can hear the whole interview here:

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