Benedict Brogan offers another nostalgia-laden lament for the end of the shuttle program. He then unwittingly sabotages his own argument:

At one level, it is easy to wonder quite why $180 billion has been spent on keeping an out-of-date white elephant in the air. But a few weeks ago when Prof Brian Cox gave a show-stopper of a lecture at Hay in which he included a picture of the distant speck of Earth taken by Voyager from the edge of the solar system [bold mine-DL], I was reminded of the irresistible attraction of this greatest of human adventures. The moment the wheels of Atlantis touched the ground earlier, it ended and our ambitions suddenly look earth-bound.

Notice that Brogan was reminded of “the irresistible attraction of this greatest of human adventures” by a picture taken by Voyager, an unmanned space probe that had nothing to do with the shuttle program or any kind of manned space flight. Had the shuttle program never existed, the Voyager probes would still have been launched and would still have reported back information on the outer planets. Sending probes to gather data about the rest of the solar system is one thing that NASA has done that has been genuinely worthwhile and has actually advanced the cause of science. Once we strip away the romanticism, national greatness rhetoric, and talk of adventure, that is the sort of thing NASA should be doing. It shouldn’t serve as a government project to make Americans feel good about themselves.