Charles Krauthammer writes of the death of the Space Shuttle: As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march. The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.... Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China. Of "manned spaceflight," perhaps: for a while, although increasingly American citizens are doing what only governments had done until recently. Manned flight may be the realm of free men and women, seeking the frontier on their own and for their own reasons. In the meanwhile, as for Russia and China, the US Air Force has fielded a fairly impressive successor you may not have heard about.
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Posted
Apr 20 2012, 07:51 AM
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