The end of an era has been announced by NASA. May 31st, 2010 is set to be the date of the last space shuttle mission before the fleet is retired and we return to rockets.

Does anyone else not think this is a huge step backwards? Of all the things that President Bush has done that I can possibly forgive him for, mucking around with the Space Shuttle program is not one of them. It's by his order that the fleet is to be retired.

Will the Ares rocket be able to accomplish similar missions? With it's higher payload capacity and design built on lessons learned from the Shuttle, I'm sure it will do just fine, but it still feels a step backwards to have astronauts splashing down in the ocean again like they did in cold war days.

The trouble is the premature cancellation of the Shuttle flights by the government rather than NASA. When will the Orion capsule be ready to sit on top of the Ares rocket to take astronauts back into space? Not until 2014. Essentially we're grounded for 7 years. Thank you Mr. Bush.

Why should the average public care? Why indeed, when the media refuses to provide any reasonable coverage of the Phoenix mission to Mars, or any other NASA accomplishments. All you get to hear is the shock value news about the two shuttle tragedies we've had out of 123 flights (not counting the Shuttle Enterprise test flights.)

If you had asked NASA engineers early on what the chances were of 60 flights of the shuttle without a major life changing incident, I bet you would have been told "1 in a million." Strapping tons of exploding fuel to your rear end and propelling yourself into orbit is a risky business. The astronauts are/were aware of this.

If anything the cause of the accidents was more the result of government funding cuts requiring NASA to do more with much less. The Discovery performed 28 missions and spent over 300 days in orbit total.

Each shuttle was designed with a 10 year lifespan. The Discovery was first launched in 1984, and is still being launched this year, 14 years AFTER it's warranty period. The Columbia which broke up on reentry in 2003 was 22 years old, more than double it's original lifespan estimate.

The problem is that we've still been using old vehicles well beyond their lifespan rather than building newer, better ones. The problem was budget cuts.

In 1981, the Columbia was the first Shuttle launched into space (Enterprise was simply a test vehicle) and was the first manned space flight since Apollo-Soyuz in 1975. Even that gap of no American manned vehicles in space was less than the next gap we face before the Ares is ready.

I'm just as concerned with the media's inability to have a conscience. I grew up watching Space Shuttle launches. One of my dreams was to visit a launch first hand, which I never had the opportunity to do. When I was 8 I wanted to be an astronaut. With the media coverage of our space program these days, what exactly do we expect to inspire the next generation of rocket scientists and astronauts to keep propelling us forward? My own cable company no longer even carries the NASA channel, and the major news broadcasts didn't even mention Phoenix the night it landed. Today's kids barely even know a space program exists, and the only mental picture they have is of the shuttle disasters because that's all the news covers.

Point to note? MSNBC doesn't even mention the announcement of the canceled missions, despite the AP story. They do however have a main story in their tech section describing that "sex in space is inevitable" that goes on to suggest a few positions. Well, I guess it's space news... if you want tabloids.