Source: The Huntville Times
America’s human spaceflight program is at a galactic crossroads.
The space shuttle program will end soon, and there are no clearly defined space goals that NASA centers like Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center can comfortably hang their proverbial space helmets on.
NASA has been here before. When the Apollo moon program wound down with the last lunar flight in 1972, only four manned missions followed under the Skylab program.
After the Apollo-Soyuz rendevous in July 1975, American astronauts remained grounded until the first space shuttle flight in April 1981.
The shuttle program, with its ability to deploy and retrieve satellites and ferry components to build the International Space Station, led to phenomenal spinoffs in materials processing, earth sciences, medical breakthroughs and discoveries that have deepened our understanding of the cosmos.
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