Is America Losing Its Mojo?

Benedict Brogan, writing in the UK Telegraph, talks about the end of the Space Shuttle program and how it's symptomatic of many other things going on in American life:

At one level, it is easy to wonder quite why $180 billion has been spent on keeping an out-of-date white elephant in the air.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, 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. It’s also a moment freighted with symbolism for America and its sense of self. You don’t have to read The Right Stuff to know that the manned space flight programme was a way for the US to assert its confidence and demonstrate its will to do anything required to be number one. In those days it was about beating the Soviets, and so those pressures don’t exist now in the same way. But with the idea of American exceptionalism under review and the US losing its mojo, we should not underestimate the capacity for this moment to be a blow to American morale.

Read the rest of it here.

This is the first time in the history of America's manned space program that we've ended a series without anything scheduled to come next. Mercury got us in space and paved the way for Gemini. Gemini tested long duration flight and some of the maneuvers that would be necessary to go to the moon in Apollo. Apollo took us to the moon, but even when the last moon mission ended in 1972 there was something on the horizon. Skylab came next with missions in '73 and '74, and the final Apollo mission in '75 was the historic joint Apollo-Soyuz flight with the Russians. A few years passed as the Shuttle was readied, but after Apollo we still had things to do.

Thirty years of Shuttle flights have now ended...and we've got nothing. Yes, we'll still send our guys on borrowed rides with the Russians, but we no longer have the capability to launch our own people into orbit, and that's a national tragedy.  Right now Richard Branson has more space capability than the U.S. does.

And keep in mind, this is a recent development. I saw a TV special on History Channel just a couple of days ago that was made in 2007 which talked about the Orion project that was to follow the Shuttle and would lead to America returning to the moon. That was canceled by Obama in 2010.  America won't be looking to the stars as long as Obama is president.  He needs that money to pay off unions and other political cronies.

It's a sad day.

UPDATE:  Saw this on Twitter:

Rick Perry accuses Obama of "leaving American astronauts...to hitchhike into space"

True.