Symbolic End of an Empire
 

Slideshow of last shuttle landing. Baton officially handed to China, enjoy space. It turns out you guys are the future of humanity, who knew?

Sad moment indeed, but I hope the future of re-usable space vehicles is in the hands of private enterprise. Slightly better. I still want my jet-car!

SpaceX looks like an actual option. They have put stuff into orbit and can do it for a tenth of the cost (per pound of payload) of others. I saw one of their capsules a month after it orbited Earth when they had the grand opening of a Tesla dealership next to my work. The same guy owns both companies.

Very cool. I like these photos of a dad and son at the first space shuttle launch and at the last space shuttle launch.

Story here.

Damn, my T-shirts never last 30 years.

Mine do but they don't fit over [fat bastard] mah great belly![/fat bastard]

That guy doesn't look very swarthy/sweaty so he probably doesn't have to wash it every half hour.

Elon Musk. PayPal mafia.

Interesting article on why the shuttle was a failure, and why it's good it's ending.

He makes some very good points about the weaknesses in the Shuttle program. It should have been replaced or supplemented long ago. We can now expect to do pure science robotic missions, which will yield great information which China can use to colonize near space. I'd like to see private enterprise pick up the pieces but I don't know who would have deep enough pockets to initiate manufacturing and resource extraction. I'm not saying it can't be done, but as a nation we missed a great opportunity in space development between the fall of the Soviets and the rise of the Chinese. Maybe I'm just having trouble shaking the Cold War paradigm. Humanity is destined to expand, but maybe we can hope it'll less about flags and more about people.

Research that NASA once sponsored, seems to have been picked up by the DARPA. That said, I'd like to see NASA continue.