STS-135: The last Space Shuttle mission.

[Autumnlicious]

The Shuttle is 1970's technology, though. It would have been nice to have a replacement in place before scrapping it but it is a political and budgetary football.

The shuttle was an prototype design that was never refined once too many Americans and politicians said "Works well enough. Mission accomplished!"

It suffers from instabilities inherent in the glider configuration, hydrazine storage tanks being in front and in back with no method of sharing fuel (causing a shift in the center of mass, which is dangerous for a flying craft, let alone a space craft), the tiles required glue and the safety factors have always been called into question.

Challenger and Colombia suffered the same critical fault -- the executive branch routinely clearing out and replacing qualified managers with their immediate cronies, leading NASA to be headed by people who couldn't tell the difference between Hydrazine and Hydrogen (One is a caustic, deadly fuel, the other is part of water).

NASA will always be subpar as long as it remains the puppet that it is. That doesn't mean they don't do good science, it just means that every large scale decision will be filled with plenty of idiocies to rival this:



Finally, the "know how" for interplanetary travel, technology is rapidly dying off, with no one to replace them due to the incredible vanishing NASA magic trick, which certainly causes prospective students to either aim for SpaceX (relatively small and hyper competitive) or give up and try Aerospace Engineering at Lockheed or something.

Once again, limited opportunities, generational die-offs will be the death of any competitive US space program.

The best we can hope for, reasonably, is that SpaceX presents a cheap enough and powerful vehicle that they become wildly successful.

But we all know that banking on the "market" to fix things is just as fallible as relying on God fix things.