Endings

[smeehrrr]

A confluence of endings for me: Today marked the end of the Space Shuttle program, and tomorrow is my last day at Microsoft. So I’m going to write about both of these things, which means this will be long, so you can probably stop reading now.
In what I know will come as an enormous shock to people who didn’t know me back then, I was an enormous

Comments

[rmd]

Leaving is a crazy scary thing. I hope it's awesome for you and that you enjoy life after Microsoft even more than the good parts of life during.

As for the shuttle, yeah. Getting people into orbit is another thing we useful be great at that we now outsource to other countries.
I remember the feeling of optimism and how it faded away.

[haddayr]

Oh, wow. This is an amazing post. I hope that today doesn't suck as bad as you thought it would.

All change IS a loss, actually, even if it's good change. You're losing who you were. You're gaining who you ARE, but still.

I cannot talk about the space program without crying so I'll stop there.

[llachglin]

Great post. Life is what happens while you're making other plans, and kicking ass at Microsoft is what happens while you're watching your childhood dreams of space travel fade and die.

But. The Shuttle was a placeholder for the kind of space exploration we should be doing. Cool as it was, it was a low-earth space truck. We can and should set our sights higher. I think we'll eventually regroup and send humans to other planets. We'll probably have to send a lot of robots first, starting with the explorers we send now and progressing to more complex machines that can prepare the way for sustained human travel. We'll also need better and cheaper launch technologies. I think some greater involvement by private money might actually help here, and remember I say this as a big commie. So I'm sad about the Shuttle at the same time I have hope that we're going to end up somewhere better, probably right about the time we're old men looking wistfully back on what could have been, and what cool shit we managed to do here on Earth in the meantime.

[wrog]

I still can't shake the feeling that the only way we're getting off this planet will be when the environment gets sufficiently hinky that space starts looking pleasant by comparison.

[wrog]

I also can't shake the feeling that this is going to happen on a much shorter timescale than one might otherwise think (i.e., not millions of years)