The Final Shuttle Run

NASA's Space Shuttle Atlantis comes back to Earth on Friday after freshening up the Hubble telescope. And when that crew lands, it will be the end of the Shuttle Program.

While the shuttles flew a lot longer than originally planned, it will still be a bittersweet moment when it touches down. And even more so, because it feels like the end of a chapter in my life.

I am a child of the Space Age. I was five in 1962, and I remember watching every Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launch. If it took place during school, we watched, or listened on the radio, in the classroom.

In my home town of West Lafayette, I was able to get out of school on the day when Neil Armstrong made the first speech he made after walking on the moon to an audience at Purdue University. I sat far, far back in bleachers, and you could hear a pin drop as he quietly spoke of his experience.

I remember when the Apollo program finished. It was disappointing that the final two moon missions were cancelled. But there was SkyLab and the promise of a space station ahead. And plans to build a re-usable ship, which eventually became the shuttle program.

But now feels different. Plans of returning to the moon, and continuing on to Mars, are constantly spoken of. The past two presidents have pledged to support a return to the moon, but NASA's budget gets cut. I feel like I may not live to see man return to the moon, when we originally thought that men would be on their way to Mars by now. New modes of space transportation are "in the works," but they seem more conceptual than anything.

We need to continue with space exploration. How sad it will be if I am prophetic, and my generation dies out before man again enters space in a U.S. craft. Surely we are more of a leader than that.