Last week I posed the question of what would happen to the International Space Station without the American shuttle program to keep it going. The answer is that with or without us Americans, life in space goes on.
On June 9, late afternoon eastern time, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with three men aboard docked at the ISS. The three men were astronauts Mike Fossum (USA) and Satoshi Furukawa (Japan), and cosmonaut Sergei Volkov (Russia). Cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyaev and Andrey Borisenko along with US astronaut Ron Garan, all of whom arrived on April 6th, met them at the lock. The new six-man crew will staff the ISS for the next five months and change.
The bottom line? The Space Race is over. The rest of the world has caught up, and can handle exploration just fine without NASA. I see both hope and cause for sadness in that statement: hope because it will force us to continue to work together if we're ever to conquer the final frontier. And let's face it: sending men to the moon and satellites to the Kuyper belt doesn't really constitute conquering, does it?
Sadness, though, because it's the end of an era. The days of the Right Stuff are likely over, at least for the aeronautics arm of the American Government. Let's hope private industry can step up to the plate. What do you say, Mr. Branson? Care to do something besides haul rich folks into the suborbit? How about helping to make lunar or martian exploration a reality?
