"From Philadelphia, New York, Washington and even Reading, England, space dreamers have settled in here, ready to outlast the tropical storms that threaten to postpone the big event. Across the Space Coast, authorities expect a crowd of 750,000 to a million to gather from all corners of the globe, all yearning for a glimpse of their own space dreams."
washingtonpost.com/national/ ... ml?hpid=z2
We are about to witness the end of an era in US Human Space flight. The next US sponsored flight will be a few years away, in updated Apollo era type space craft. They will also be made in private space craft, whose development is funded more based on commercial interests.
For instance, the TOTAL Spacex program, which will be flying to the ISS in the fall, has spent only $800 million. For that they have a system that is all but ready to go to take humans to the ISS. The last piece, an escape system is being engineered and is a couple of years away. Ares 1, a rocket that never saw orbit cost several billion dollars doing it the old cost plus way. It only managed one suborbital flight.
I see the end of the STS as the beginning of commercial space flight and space tourism. We have stopped using the space program as a jobs program, and will be using it as a commercial program from here on out.
In almost every way, the STS should never have been built. And having been built, the tragedies that occurred should have been engineered out of the system in the EARLY 80's prior to any events. As it is, the system, was not perfected until the middle years of the last decade. What a waste of human life that was.
That said, the US did persevere, learned hard lessons, and now has a system that is terribly reliable, but also prohibitively expensive. It makes no sense at all to take an aircraft the size of a Boeing 717 into space and then land it. It looks really cool, when you compare it to the efficiency of an Apollo era rocket, you begin to see more of a Rube Goldberg device. Patches are made for patches, work arounds for work arounds, and so on. The long process needed to safe the orbiter in light of its inability to withstand any debris hit is a case in point. You wind up with heaters instead of insulation, thousands of pictures, followed by thousands of man hours reviewing the pictures all to make sure that the skin of the orbiter is not damaged.
And then once it is on the ground 30000 man hours are needed to ready JUST the skin of the orbiter for flight once again.
In the end, it is an over engineered, system that can carry only a small fraction of its total weight into space. (50000 pounds more or less payload ) Jettisoning the bulk will allow flights to carry a much higher payload into space given the same amount of thrust. The days of the Saturn V and similar rockets is about to revisit Cape Canaveral as private individuals fund flights outside of LEO.
Something close to Airline level reliability is being engineered into the new vehicles. One day soon, many people will become astronauts, as space tourists as a result.