Welcome home, Atlantis. Now what?

You're looking at a NASA photograph of Shuttle Atlantis returning to Florida's Kennedy Space Center early this morning after successfully concluding the final Shuttle mission, STS-135.

Is this the end of manned American space exploration?

There are still plans to keep American astronauts on board the International Space Station. However, for the foreseeable future, in order to get to and from, Americans will have to hitch a ride on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Indeed, NASA astronaut Mike Fossum just joined the space station crew (currently denominated Expedition 28) after a July 8 launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

But that's not exactly boldly going where no one has gone before. It amounts to taking a cab.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Director of the Rose Center for Earth and Space of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, tweeted earlier today, "Lament not the shuttle's end, but the absence of rockets to supplant it. Who shed a tear when Gemini ended? Apollo awaited us."

Dr. Tyson hits the nail exactly on the head. Not only does America lack a plan for further space exploration, it lacks the will to execute any plan. There's some vague notion that, some day, maybe, we might think about mounting an expedition to Mars. Maybe we'll go to an asteroid first....

Tyson's tweets note that President Kennedy's original target date for the lunar landing would have been during his second term. (As it happened, the landing was pushed back to 1969 because of the Apollo 1 fire.) Dr. Tyson notes, "One US President can never [actually] commit the nation to a goal that requires fulfillment by a President 'to be named later.'" Case in point: President Bush proposed returning to the Moon as a stepping stone toward Mars. President Obama killed that.

Are we ceding leadership in the exploration of the cosmos because it is too costly?

Again, I look to Dr. Tyson for some perspective (from his July 8 tweets):

• The entire half-century budget of NASA equals the current two year budget of the US military.
• The US bank bailout exceeded the half-century lifetime budget of NASA.
• The US military spends as much in 23 days as NASA spends in a year - and that's when we're not fighting a war.

The United States can afford space exploration; what we can't afford is to stop.

Meanwhile, the private sector is expected to step up and take over flights to low Earth orbits -- but there's some question as to whether private enterprise can rise to the challenge.

In an AP report carried this morning by HuffPost AOL News, Marcia Dunn reports that the STS-135 crew left an American flag on board the space station. This was a flag that was flown on the very first Shuttle flight in 1981. It was left behind as a prize for the first private company that can fly up and claim it in person. Dunn's article continues:

SpaceX maintains it can get people to the space station within three years of getting the all-clear from NASA. Station managers expect it to be more like five years. Some skeptics say it could be 10 years before Americans are launched again from U.S. soil.

Let's hope the skeptics are wrong.

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For Further Reading:

Why America Needs to Explore Space, by Neil deGrasse Tyson (from Parade Magazine, August 5, 2007.

Now is not the time to quit, by Storer H. Rowley, Chicago Tribune, July 21, 2011.