Final countdown: As nasa prepares to scrap its workhorse, Alex Hannaford of The Telegraph meets the last shuttle pilots and asks: where next?

Jake Stanfill will never forget the day his parents took him down to the beach at Sebastian Inlet, Fla. It was April 12, 1981, and he was 11 years old. Up the coast about 65 kilometres, but clearly visible to the Stanfills and their friends who had gathered on the warm sands and were now looking skyward, the space shuttle Columbia was preparing for liftoff.

It was a clear day and, as a vertical plume of bright white smoke shot heavenward, the young Jake -one of thousands of spectators who witnessed the launch -watched the shuttle roll over on its back and then separate from its boosters. He turned to his parents. "Tears were streaming down their faces with pride," he says. "It was then I realized we were on the cusp of something the world had never seen."

On Tuesday, June 28 -just over 30 years on from that inaugural launch -Chris Ferguson, Rex Walheim, Sandy Magnus and Doug Hurley will suit up and climb into the space shuttle Atlantis bound for the International Space Station. The foursome will make history as the last crew ever to fly a NASA space shuttle mission. The significance of this final flight is not lost on the international space community, or on the astronauts themselves. The spacecraft is, in the words of Sandy Magnus, the only woman on board that final Atlantis mission, "the most unique vehicle that human beings have ever built,"

Columbia's first trip into orbit, which launched the shuttle program, quickly became a symbol of U.S. power and dominance. A statement by then-president Ronald Reagan, read to Columbia's crew, said: "You go forward this morning in a daring enterprise and you take the hopes and prayers of all Americans with you. As you hurtle from Earth in a craft unlike anything ever constructed, you will do so in a feat of American technology and American will."

"Did it blow people's minds? Certainly," says Valerie Neal, a curator of human space history at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.

"It was an awesome achievement -something people took great pride in. This technology held the promise of space flight becoming routine, and simply by looking like an aircraft, it was easy to extrapolate that it could operate like airplanes operate and that some day, ordinary people could go into space as well. In that early '80s flush of optimism, this was the way of the future."

The shuttle program was the result of a decision by then-president Richard Nixon's administration to shut down the Apollo program to reduce federal spending. "People were not impressed with that," says Professor John Logsdon, author of several books about manned space flight and a NASA Advisory Council committee member.



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Test of Big Space Rocket Set for Late 2012

An American space company says a powerful new rocket should be ready for a test launch by the end of next year. The company is Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. Its new rocket is called the Falcon Heavy.

Test of Big Space Rocket

Company officials say it will be able to Transport satellites or spacecraft weighing up to fifty-three metric tons into orbit. Fifty-three metric tons is one hundred seventeen thousand pounds. That load weight is double the capacity of NASA space shuttles. The space agency is retiring its shuttles after thirty years.

Elon Musk is the chief executive officer of SpaceX.

ELON MUSK: "One hundred seventeen thousand pounds is more than a fully loaded Boeing 737 with one hundred thirty-six passengers, luggage and fuel in orbit. So that is really, really humongous. It’s more payload capability than any vehicle in history, apart from the Saturn Five."

NASA used Saturn Five rockets during its Apollo and Skylab programs in the nineteen sixties and seventies. A Saturn Five launched the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on the moon in nineteen sixty-nine.

The rockets were removed from service in nineteen seventy-three. But they remain the most powerful ever built.

Elon Musk says the Falcon Heavy will be the second most powerful rocket ever. He says it was designed to do more than carry satellites and other equipment into space. He says the rocket was designed to meet NASA's ratings for human flight safety. So it could someday be used to carry astronauts and other travelers into space.

Mr. Musk says the Falcon Heavy could also be used for missions like carrying a robotic lander to collect samples from Mars.

ELON MUSK: "It has so much capability, so much more capability than any other vehicle, that I think we can start to contemplate missions like a Mars sample return, which requires a tremendous amount of lift capability because you’ve got to send a lander to Mars that still has enough propellant to return to Earth."

The first launch is planned from the company's launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. A launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, is expected in late twenty-thirteen or fourteen.

In time, SpaceX hopes to launch ten Falcon Heavy rockets a year. It says the rocket should reduce launch costs to about two thousand dollars a kilogram. That is about one-tenth the cost of carrying loads into orbit on a space shuttle.

SpaceX already has a billion-and-a-half-dollar deal with NASA to use a smaller rocket to transport cargo to the International Space Station. The rocket is the Falcon 9, and the deal is for after the two last shuttles -- Endeavour and Atlantis -- are retired this year.

And that's the VOA Special English Technology Report, written by June Simms and Jessica Berman. I'm Steve Ember.
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