*(actual future may vary-
and be less interesting)
Welp, that's it. The Space Shuttle Discovery's last mission took off on Thursday. If you haven't already, watch this video (see below, I embedded it or something). It's totally amazing and a complete bummer at the same time. It's amazing because a bunch of passengers on a delayed flight happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch a shuttle launch from the air. Most people whose flights get delayed just miss their connections. These people witnessed something incredible (although they still probably missed connections as well).
They held eight minutes of
silent footage and ran on whale oil.
Anyway, this totally bums me out because it looks like this is one of the last shuttle missions ever. It would be ok if the space shuttles were going to be replaced by something even more awesome, but they're not. Instead we're going back to rockets and space capsules, which strikes me as kind of a step back. Could you imagine if Sony tried to bring back VHS tapes? For those who don't remember, it's what we had before streaming Netflix. You had to go all the way to the video rental, sometimes in like ten feet of snow and then when you were done, you had to rewind them and then take them back. Those were primitive times indeed.
As a matter of fact, I don't.
So look out next generation of space explorers, the future is here! And has been since the 1960's. Sigh. Oh, wait, it's actually not here. As a final insult, due to budget constraints these rockets we're all looking forward to (backwards to?) are themselves a few years off according to NASA. So the future is the past, but it's still a ways off in the future...follow?
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