The Best Tributes to the End of the Space Shuttle Era

The cockpit communications were switched to a private channel, and the loudspeakers went silent. The bleachers were quiet then, too. So much planning, so much money and nerve, and it all might be scrubbed because of two pins in a door. That’s just the way things had been going.

But for the routine space-station trips that constitute almost all manned spaceflight today, the Soyuz is not only $19 million cheaper per astronaut to launch than the shuttle, but it's also by most measures safer -- it hasn't had a fatal accident in 29 years.

"Where'd it go?" one kid asked her father. "Poof," he answered, and even to us adults, that made sense—it felt as if Dumbledore, or maybe God, had grabbed that rocket and the six men inside and taken them to another dimension, leaving only smoke and awe behind.

"I never imagined anything like this for Krtek," says his creator, Mr. Miler, now 90 years old and living in an assisted-living facility. "But I think the character has earned it himself, and it's a big honor."

Assembling the interviews, it became clear that, even allowing for their obvious differences – in age, sex, creed and background – a few general observations can be made. The first thing to say is that these are alpha people...They are fantastic specimens – physically fit, mentally stable, flying universities in some cases – and yet much of what they do is rigidly orchestrated.

It is tempting to say that this is an outrage; that the effective end of the American manned spaceflight program is a national humiliation; that the program's demise is yet another symbol of the gap in mentality between the confident, ambitious Kennedy-Johnson years and today's solipsistic, penny-pinching America. It is tempting to say all that, but the temptation should be resisted.

It might not be that the space program is insufficiently whiz-bang or beyond our means so much as that we’re now too busy, scared, or pissed off for it to mean anything to us. Which is a shame; baffled and broke-ish and hacked-off as the nation is, a little bit of that old humbling space-wonder and some of the shared purpose necessary to get people from here to there would go a long way right now.

I have asked dozens of astronauts what it feels like to blast off, and words always fail them. A roller coaster is the standard analogy, with adjectives piled on to suggest that it’s something more thrilling and terrible, something inexpressible. Often their eyes clamp shut at the memory and sometimes they shiver. No one has ever answered with a smile.

A compromise tends to leave everyone unhappy, and 30 years on so it proved with the shuttle. The costs continued to rankle with those who thought manned space flight a waste of money, and three decades spent stuck in low-Earth orbit never stopped frustrating those who wanted to go farther.

It was thrilling to watch astronauts blast off on smoke pillars, but after a while it was irritating that they weren’t going anywhere but in circles around the Earth and the science they were doing was mostly boring compared with the results being beamed back from the Voyager spacecraft exploring the outer planets at considerably less expense and risk.

There was always a just-do-it-ness to the decision to fly the shuttles. Tiles fell from one ship and the next one was glued together better and rolled out to the pad. Launches were scrubbed for this or that glitch six or seven times in a row, and the astronauts would gamely suit up for try No. 8. Seven people died and the crews kept coming. Seven more were lost and still they came.