By Andrew Moseman

On April 12, 1981, the first space shuttle mission took flight. Carrying John Young, AE 52, as half of its two-man crew, the Columbia mission, dubbed STS-1, completed more than three-dozen Earth orbits and inaugurated a new era at NASA.

Thirty years later, the shuttle Atlantis—carrying another Tech astronaut, Sandra Magnus, Phd CerE 96—completed STS-135, its final mission.

Now, the remaining shuttles are on their way to museums and human space travel faces an uncertain future. But Robert Braun, former NASA chief technologist and the David and Andrew Lewis Professor in Space Technology at Georgia Tech, is undeterred.

“The space shuttle was a workhorse—it was the centerpiece of human space exploration for the last 30 years,” he says. “But retiring the space shuttle doesn’t mean that we’re retiring human spaceflight. It’s quite the opposite.”

For now, the United States must buy seats on Russian spacecraft to get American astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Meanwhile, NASA is nurturing the American private space industry, hoping those companies can build space-worthy vehicles capable of taking over for the shuttles in low Earth orbit. And the space administration is trying to dream big once more, setting its sights on sending explorers to places humans have never been—presuming there’s money to pay for it.

“There are all kinds of opportunities waiting in the wings,” astronaut Magnus says. “We will eventually get out of low Earth orbit and go somewhere. We might not do it with the easiest route, because we’re human beings and we don’t always do things the easy way, but we will do it. I have no doubt.”

Heavy Lifting

Rewind to 2004. With the space shuttle program set for retirement at the end of the decade, President George W. Bush called upon NASA to envision a future for Americans in space beyond the ISS. The result was a set of rockets and spacecraft called the Constellation Program. But NASA’s next big thing barely got off the launch pad. Six years into the program, Constellation’s components lagged behind schedule and remained underfunded, so President Obama axed it as part of his overhaul of the U.S. space program.

But NASA hopes this was more of a pause than a full stop. In an April 2010 speech, Obama called on the space agency to develop a new way to send humans not only bang-zoom to the moon, but to an asteroid in the 2020s or even to Mars after that. NASA’s response was the Space Launch System, a rocket system that will be able to lift 70 metric tons of payload upon its first flight (scheduled for 2017) and eventually as much as the 130 metric tons necessary to fly humans beyond the Earth’s orbit, says Roy Malone, EE 80, who heads the new Shuttle-Ares Transition Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

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