Written by: Cole Peterson on August 8, 2011.

Costly manned space program ends with return of Atlantis

On July 21st, the space shuttle Atlantis touched down at NASAs Kennedy Space Center, signaling the end of the shuttle program and, for a time, Americas adventures in manned space flight.

The event garnered a great deal of media attention as articles and interviews called up great feelings of nostalgia, sadness and disappointment over the fact that NASA and the Bush administration had brought an end to our glorious era in space and shattered all those dreams that had been born from the moon landing so long ago.

The loss of the shuttle program is not, however, something to be mourned. Rather, it should be celebrated as something long overdue that desperately needed to be done.

The space shuttle should have easily been recognizable as a flop within the first decade of its inception. It was painfully expensive, costing an average of $450 million to launch rather than the predicted $55 million. It was inefficient, averaging five launches a year, rather than a predicted 65. Finally, it was incredibly unsafe.

Press releases from NASA indicated the risk of catastrophe was one in 100,000, but some engineers put the number closer to one in a hundred and, for earlier models, a terrifying one in nine. Its a wonder that the history of the space program is not littered with more Challenger- and Columbia-level tragedies.

On top of being a fiscal and safety nightmare, the shuttle program also failed to do much in expanding our presence in space. It was capable of ferrying goods to and from the space station and it provided a platform for certain experiments, but none of that is terribly exciting, revolutionary or even something only the shuttle was capable of.

We havent even bothered to return to the moon or explore much farther than the immediate area outside our atmosphere except with robots. Robots and probes have been far more useful in expanding our knowledge of our solar system, and even a tiny sliver of the galaxy beyond. Weve put a robot on Mars and Japan landed one on the side of a moving asteroid.

Go here to read the rest:

The little space shuttle that couldn't