So Long, Space!

Today the brave and wasteful decades of the American space program as we have known it come crunching to a halt. From its beginnings as wildly adventurous jaunts to its ghastly end as porters and bellboys to the International Space Station, 30 years and 135 space shuttle missions later, we are officially Done With Space Shuttling. We’ll always have our little laboratory on the Station, and corporations are happy to do our transit for us, but space is now for the Europeans, the Japanese and the Russian nerd heartthrobs — goodbye, pencil-necked cutie Sergei Volkov, you second-generation cosmonaut! Now our machines are going to go to some asteroid and to the atmosphere of Jupiter and, most interestingly, our newest machine, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, which will orbit the equator and listen for black holes, and then later to triage with the other space machines to rise up and destroy us. FROM SPACE.