After traveling more than six and a half million miles in sixteen days, the space shuttle Endeavor landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base in California, on Sunday the 30th of November. Originally scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center, the weather didn't cooperate so NASA had to change the original re-entry and landing plans. Endeavor will be ferried home on a Boeing 747, probably later this week. You can find mission pictures here.
I always breathe a sigh of relief when a shuttle takes off or touches down safely. Since the Challenger exploded just after launch in 1986, and the Columbia re-entry disaster in 2003, there's been that awareness of tension about the danger our explorers face, and that poignant sense of waiting and hoping for their safe return. It's always been part of the experience of those who stay behind, I suppose.
Remember the voice-over from the opening credits on the original Star Trek? "Space, the final frontier . . . " In 1977, the first space shuttle was fittingly named Enterprise, in response to a write-in campaign organized and waged by Star Trek fans. How long do you suppose we've looked out at the stars and wondered what we'd find there? Space truly is a frontier, still. Anyone drawn to tales of exploration and adventure can't help, I suspect, but feel the tug of wonder when they look up at the stars. Whether it's the first time we marvel at the Northern Lights, make a wish on a shooting star, or drive miles out of town to sit out on a cold and windy hillside in the middle of the night to watch a meteor shower—sooner or later the question comes up, "What's out there?" Then sooner or later, some wise-guy says, "Well, let's go find out."
We can't all go to space. Thanks to the 'net, though, we can all watch the brave and lucky few who do get to go. And millions of us watched the Twitter feed for MarsPhoenix, in the days before the lander finally succumbed and went silent —and I know for a fact that I wasn't the only one choked up, upon seeing that last tweet, in binary. The Mars team has tweeted that they need a name for the next rover, by the way, so they're running a contest for kids to name MarsScienceLab (also twittering, under @MarsScienceLab.) And there's the NASA TV site, if you just can't get enough, or you'd rather have pictures than text.
Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, then Endeavor continued the program that Enterprise began. Columbia and Challenger, of course, both met with disaster. The last planned flights of the three remaining shuttles in service—the last planned flights of NASA's Space Shuttle Program—are scheduled for 2010. I really, really hope they're figuring out where to go next, and even better ways for us to get there.