The Shuttle’s Final Flight: Farewell to the Space Age

Wild applause and nostalgia. Hopes and anxieties for the future, and the pain of past sacrifices. Various thoughts and challenges remain as the American space shuttle takes off on its last flight.

It’s been 30 years since Columbia’s maiden flight in April 1981. A total of over 800 people, 356 from 16 different countries, were transported on an orbit of the earth. In 1992, seven Japanese astronauts, starting with Mamoru Mohri, took a trip into outer space on the shuttle.

As if flying on an airplane, I want to go on a round-trip tour of earth and outer space. There are reusable launch vehicles to make such a dream a reality; I am sure that they are making them as close to the zero-gravity feeling of space as possible. Although they are American vehicles, they have had a big effect on the rest of the world. I want to see an era that has built itself to be able to stretch out into space.

For Japan, which doesn’t have a manned spaceship of its own, in order to accumulate some experience of pilots who have flown into space, the shuttle was a valuable foothold. It was also because of the shuttle that they acquired the status of having an international team member in space, coping well with their long stay at the International Space Station.

However, I have to say that from a safety and cost perspective, the shuttle plans were “a failure.”

A total of 14 people were victims in the Challenger accident of 1986 and the Columbia one in 2003. I can in no way say that the odds of two accidents occurring in the thousands of flights are low. The background is that launch vehicles have complex designs and systems in place.

As such, launch objectives have been restricted because safety costs have been bumped up. There is no spare time or money left in America at the moment to renovate ground facilities and worn out fuselages.

The Obama administration has decided to go back to the single-use spaceships like the Apollo spacecraft, and is working out the details for a manned flight plan to the moon, asteroids and Mars. However, with the way things are going the plans to do this are unclear.

The development of manned transport that will link earth with the International Space Station has been put in non-governmental hands. It’s going to be many years yet before the first unit will fly, so there is no other choice but to pay the high costs of “hitch-hiking” on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

We are moving away from the idea of a next-generation shuttle which remains undeveloped, and the world map of space will probably undergo some changes. The International Space Station, which was established with the shuttle at the forefront, is also under question as to its cost effectiveness and reason for existing.

While this is going on, Japan has changed its future hitching arrangements from the shuttle to the Soyuz. What place will its manned flights take in the future? Giving an answer to this is not going to be easy, as at the moment Japan is up to its neck in dealing with the two-fold tsunami and nuclear power plant disaster.

What about working on improving the unmanned asteroid probe “Hayabusa?” Or looking for a way to carry out its own manned flight? Making priorities and strategies clear has become more crucial than ever.