Atlantis recently made its long flight home ending a long, rich, and memorable history of space exploration. The four astronauts on Atlanta touched down on Thursday to a large crowd of onlookers. 2,000 people gathered to catch a final sight of a space shuttle in motion.
Atlantis has been a historic flight with its first mission occurring in October of 1985. The first flight was highly classified but believed to be aiding the department of defense in launching defense satellites with this mission only lasting 4 days. The final Atlantis flight served to provide supplies to the International Space Station. Along with typical supplies, this last mission brought with it supplies in order to complete experiments aboard the ISS. Among these was an iPhone that was to log experiments progress.
There has been a surge of private companies vying at space exploration continuation. Although it could take three to five years before we see any notable efforts from Americans to return to space, there is hope. Many ideas are being thrown around from advertising on space shuttles to unique ideas such as a reality show (Americas Next Top Astronaut) to use TV revenues to fund the next mission. However, none have been innovative enough to provide a quick solution.
The return of Atlantis at 5:57 am was joyous for many but others throughout NASA fear mass layoffs coming their way. However, this is not an immediate viable concern as data from past space shuttle missions still needs processing as well as developing the information from space experiments to possibly be used for commercial use.
While some have called the space shuttle programs closing a very sad event, others welcome it saying that the space shuttle program has been nothing more than a billion dollar disaster. They are excited that these budget expenses that could have once been spent on space can now go to other more worthy causes such as cancer research. However, with America’s financial crisis in and out of government, increased spending on any cause does not seem likely. Nevertheless, these individuals still insinuate the space program never reached its mission of finding easy space travel as we have not left the atmosphere by more than a relatively small margin.
Many people including these final astronauts were in tears after the mission was completed. Many of them gave the media their favorite memories as well as some parting words for the space program.
– Aardvark: The aardvark is a burrowing mammal, with a stocky hairy body, large ears, and a long tubular snout somewhat resembling a pig’s. It is found over much of Africa and it eats the ants and termites that it excavates with its powerful digging claws. The animal is in actuality a pale yellowish-gray color, but in the wild it is usually seen covered with a thick layer of reddish dust from its digging activities.
