Next Gen News

Another article from 1969 – "Mars flight delay" (love the use of "delay" there) – gives a sense of how different space exploration looked from the perspective of the moon landing in the late 1960s. Here is the first paragraph:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's aim of landing a man on Mars in the next decade is likely to be deferred until at least the late 1980s

It says the working group is to advise likely that the U.S. is set to "to explore and colonize the Moon" and "on the development of manned earth space stations \ circle" instead of "test of an early manned landing on Mars." focus

Added towards the end of the article the correspondent, that the working group reported, called for the exploration "reusable space shuttles, the passengers would be cut to and from space stations, ferry [to] dramatically the cost of currently $ 350 million for each man have launched \. "

It was this last program that three years later Nixon would give the green light, and economical for the same reasons. "It is the astronomical cost of \ to take out the space," said the statement. (Not that it has succeeded: the average startup cost $ 450m.)

Before Nixon 's announcement it was a discussion, what form such a shuttle could look like. A thread that follows from the Guardian coverage of this period is the interest of the British Aircraft Corporation (later became part of BAe) in conjunction of the shuttle program.

But back to the 1970s and the shuttle's first solo flight, when a transport plane takes Enterprise to 24,100 ft over the Mojave desert. Pilot Fred Haise, who brought Apollo 13 back to Earth, glides it down to an unpowered "perfect" landing at the Edwards Air Force base.

After the long embarrassing delays, the many false starts and the endless stream of doubts about America's technological capacity, the success of the space shuttle mission is particularly poignant.

At Three Mile Island in 1979, the high hopes of a nuclear age of power generation fell flat on their face and the country turned back to conservation and oil. The breakdown of American helicopters in the Iranian desert and the subsequent tragic farce is ingrained on the public memory even today, 12 months later, when the hostages are safely back with their families.

That "standard" answer? "Thrilled".

Seven including the New Hampshire school teacher Christa McAuliffe died on 28 January 1986 when Challenger launched into a deep blue sky, turning, in the words of the Guardian report, "into a ferocious fireball as a bolt on the main fuel tank exploded". From a report the day after ("America mourns its space heroes") come the following paragraphs:

The debate over the causes of the Challenger disaster was in the same conditions as national sober reminder of the things done in terms of life, material loss and the future of the shuttle program.

At a morning church service in Concord, New Hampshire, the hometown of the teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe, 300 children described their feelings. The sombre mood was seen as reminiscent of America in the days after the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King in the 1960s.

The dead astronauts were a profile of Americans in the mid-1980s: the commander, Francis Scobee, the pilot, Michael Smith, were Vietnam veterans, Judith Resnik was the only professional woman working as a Mission Specialist, Ellison Onizuka, a Japanese- American and Mission Specialist, Ronald McNair, a black and mission specialist, Gregory Jarvis, Hughes Aircraft, aerospace scientists and Christa McAuliffe, the instant darling of the country 's children

Shuttle flights were suspended for 32 months. When all seven Columbia 's crew were killed, as resolved on re-entry to Earth' s atmosphere in February 2003 it was 29 months before the next space mission.

Of the remaining shuttles Endeavour and Discovery are now retired and museum exhibits in Los Angeles and Washington DC 's northern Virginia suburbs. When Atlantis makes its final return, it will bring to a close more than 40 years of space age history.