A Western Space Grounding

As of now, Shuttle Atlantis has disengaged from the International Space Station and is preparing for re-entry and landing.  With that, NASA's space shuttle program comes to an end after 30 years, which also means the end of manned US space missions for the foreseeable future.  Now, the Russian space program is going to have to carry the whole load to maintain the ISS and it seems like big Western space dreams are grounded for now.

The hard part about this is that I've read the arguments against the usefulness of manned space flights and they have some merits.  For instance, the Shuttle program was supposed to be a low cost delivery system get people into space and that has never been the case with massive cost overruns with a vehicle that was an economy design compromise from the beginning. After all, wouldn't it have made more sense for the Shuttle to be able to have powered atmospheric flight when coming down, instead of being the super expensive glider it is on the return trip? 

Even worse, when NASA tried to maintain the kind of schedule to justify the program in the 1980s, that led to a bureaucratic mentality that led them to ignore safety problems that led to the Challenger explosion. The whole age and the fragility of the vehicles that led to the destruction of the Columbia because its heat shield tiles were damaged; obviously if a space vehicle requires a life-or-death EVA examination of its integrity on every trip, then it is simply not acceptable. What I do fault NASA for is that they should have been working on a successor vehicle for the Shuttles decades ago and thus have a viable replacement ready to go.  As much as I am aware about budgetary realities, the tragedy of not acting on that kind of basic foresight is obvious. I just wish the secondary benefits of NASA's operation like new inventions like teflon being just the most obvious could be played up more to see how space exploration can be worth it in other and more subtle ways.

Furthermore, I've read that even the ISS is not that useful as a scientific research complex.  The sheer constant vibrations the thing makes with its essential systems apparently is a major pain for astronomical observations and other experiments.  On the other hand, the use of remote probes like Pathfinder and Opportunity have gotten great results in exploration with far more economy to say nothing about the Hubble Telescope's spectacular visuals (albeit at least after the shuttle mission to fix its lens defects). 

The problem is that manned missions are inspiring and in the long run necessary for the future of the human species, but it would be easier to think that way if there can be some definite short term advantage to having human crews while we're at it.  For instance, if there had something valuable on the Moon like some precious and/or useful mineral that would be worth going there regularly, then we'd obviously have a Moon base there by now. That said, the old premise from Space: 1999 of using it as a nuclear waste dump would seem broadly logical before economic and safety realities (which does NOT include the dumps exploding and deorbiting the satellite) come to mind.

I just hope that China might be able to embarrass the US to take their own space program seriously such as a successful manned moon mission for instance.  I certainly don't have much faith that the proposed private sector space operations will come to anything since they obviously can't indulge in the grand visions that NASA had in its glory years. As it, any new US moon mission has the problem that the vehicles were built with contracted aerospace companies, many of which are long gone. This has led to the jawdropping fact that NASA simply does not have the complete schematics of their own vehicles, such as the Saturn V Rocket so it would have to practically start from scratch as far as equipment goes.  I shake my head at such lack of vision to that can lead an organization of such smart people to come to that situation.

So here we are, effectively grounded from outer space on this hemisphere of a planet, waiting for someone to dream the dreams of the Final Frontier and to push to reach for a destiny that is still there for us to take.