The end of an era.

I am sitting in my studio/office and looking up at the wall facing my desk.  There they are, the tribute posters to the five space shuttles, right where I can look up at them and be inspired.  Joining them is my Kennedy Space Center ball cap, a "Mission Success is in Your Hands" Snoopy poster, my autographed picture from when I met Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, and a small Canadian Space Agency logo.

Nestled in the midst of this is a large picture of Teacher in Space Christa McAuliffe, with her quotation, "I touch the future. I teach."  She was my hero when I was fifteen and she's still my hero at 41.

Almost two hours ago, Atlantis blasted off for Mission STS-135, the final space shuttle launch ever.  And I'm still processing it.

I wanted to be there.  I really wanted to be there.  I was eleven years old when the first space shuttle mission took place, when Columbia's SRBs ignited and that beautiful bird shot up into the heavens.  That day I promised myself that -- someday -- I was going to see a space shuttle launch.  But I never did.

This is where I'm supposed to reflect on the past thirty years of shuttle flights, saying something profound, as the talking heads have been doing for the last week.  Some of them have been declaring that this is the end, while others have been insisting it's a new beginning.  The truth is, it could go either way.

It costs approximately $400 million dollars to launch a space shuttle.  That's just one mission.  And the space shuttle has its limitations -- it is restricted to Low Earth Orbit (LEO).  So the decision was made to retire the fleet -- the entire space shuttle program -- so that the money could be freed up to do bigger and better things.  The problem is that the path ahead looks kind of foggy, with NASA's Constellation program scrapped, and resulting reliance on various commercial companies developing space vehicles (which is ultimately a good thing, but ...).  There's now a gap, with NASA forced to spend the foreseeable future sending North American astronauts to the space station on Russian spacecraft (at a rumoured $63 million a seat).

I don't want to get into the whole "Do we go back to the Moon or do we go to Mars?" debate.  This blog post isn't big enough for that (although, just for the record, I'm a "moon first" kinda girl).  I think the bigger questions are "How are we going to go anywhere?" and "When?".

Tomorrow I will try to find reasons to be optimistic.  Tomorrow I will try to believe Chris Hadfield's assertions that the end of the shuttle program is not the end of the space age.  Tomorrow I will work on Googling developments to get excited about -- technology that will make human spaceflight beyond LEO possible, and will allow humans to explore outer space, not just skim around the edges of our own planet.

But today...

Today I am just sad.  And I think that's as profound as I'm gonna get.