Spaced out

With the Atlantis touching down at the Kennedy Space Centre on Thursday,NASAs 30-year-old space shuttle programme drew to a close. The shuttle fleet has been retired on account of the American governments budget cuts,though it has announced a programme of manned missions farther off in outer space,including to Marss orbit. For destinations in closer proximity to the Earth for instance,the International Space Mission they foresee the availability of commercial craft to ferry astronauts. And till such services are on offer,Americans will rely on berths in Russias Soviet-era craft.

That plan of action shows how much the politics of spacecraft has changed. While manned space missions are still seen to be a statement of a countrys technological capabilities,at the height of the Cold War,they were a key propaganda tool for the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet success in putting Yuri Gagarin in space to orbit the Earth infused greater energy into the US programme,and for decades they would try to better the others efforts. Long after the end of that rivalry,the ambition to launch manned missions continues to fire would-be superpowers,though the induction of commercial players in space travel is certain to alter the nationalist stakes.

Commercial travel,in any case,has revived an old fantasy about easily available and relatively affordable seats on a spacecraft. They are,by all indications,still far-fetched. Nonetheless,the nostalgia surrounding the last space shuttle flight is a reminder of the abiding human fascination for what lies beyond our earthly environs and for the possibility of having one of us survey it in person.