IN PICKING its small 2009 astronaut class, managers at America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration had to sift through some 3,500 enthusiastic applications and, when the shuttle Atlantissuccessfully took off, a crowd estimated at one million were at Cape Canaveral in Florida to see it off.
The romance of manned space travel is still be very much alive, but the reality, unfortunately, is another matter. The launch, on a 12-day mission to the International Space Station with 8,000lb of supplies and spare parts, sadly marked the last of the 30-year shuttle flight programme.
The five reusable space shuttles – Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantisand Endeavour– have flown 135 times, carrying 359 people, some of them multiple times, travelling more than 500 million miles with payloads of some 3,500 tonnes of satellites, deep-space probes, important science experiments and prefab segments of the ISS into low Earth orbit.
Now the victim of financially tougher times, the four-decade old programme, which has cost some $290 billion and 14 lives, has been scrapped. Gone with it, too, is the Constellation programme, which would have sent Americans back to the moon. Space travel is not off the agenda – Nasa has been tasked instead with developing a large new rocket to send deep into space, but no specific destination has been selected and money is tight.
Yet there was always a paradox to manned space flight. It and the astronauts are "sexy", the public loves it and Congress willingly forked up for expensive programmes taking up arguably disproportionate shares of Nasa's budget. In truth, while the shuttles ferried their important loads up to the International Space Station – not to forget launching the Hubble telescope and two planetary probes, Magellanand Galileo, to Venus and Jupiter – the great scientific advances in space, the real reaching into what JFK called the "new frontier", are being made using automated machines and robots. Robots have flown circles round Jupiter and Saturn, rovers have rumbled across Mars, and Hubble has seen extraordinary objects and processes deep in space.
So boots on Mars is off the agenda for now and Nasa will pay Russia $55 million a seat to send up to six astronauts a year to the space station for the duration of its likely 10-year life. But what matters is that the important fundamental space research continues. If the US is to retain its real lead in space, its diminished 61-strong astronaut team will not be blazing the trail, but concentrating instead on the next generation of R2D2s.