Per ardua ad astra

I think the Shuttle was a pointless, dead-end piece of Cold War penis-envy mostly concerned with militarising space. It was also a beautiful, noble enterprise which appeared to give us perspective: from space, we all look the same, and this poisoned rock looked relatively unharmed by the stupid things we do to it. It's a reactionary dream - that we can 'beat' gravity, go faster, escape the consequences of our actions - and yet 'to boldly go' for the sake of it is utterly seductive. The Shuttle looked like the future because it wasn't a few blocked perched on top of a missile. Next stop: the Enterprise.

Actually, the next stop was the junkyard, while the Russian fireworks continue to taxi cosmonauts and astronauts safely into orbit. But this video by McLean Fahnestock (now there's a name conjured from a space opera) is a stunning work of art. Drawing on minimalism, it's a collage of all 135 launches - video and sound, until just one, tragic, journey ends the dream. Turn up the speakers, put it on full-screen and be prepared for tears.

Atlantis: an excess of fantasy

“It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of Science Fiction . . . some of the last Presidents of the U.S.A. seemed to have been recruited straight from Disneyland.” 

J. G. Ballard, Hello America. 

If you click here, you can see the last images of the space shuttle Atlantis with the cockpit powered up. It's a fascinating, and elegiac, series. Despite our technological fantasies, Atlantis is an analogue machine: bakelite switches and dials with jury-rigged laptops squeezed in here and there. It's a 1970s vision of the future, from a time when - despite the looming nuclear war - people could assume that The Future was A Good Thing. In retrospect, they were wrong. The shuttle (the name declares its lack of ambition, while promising cheap frequent trips which never materialised) was a horribly contrived bundle of compromises. Manned space exploration is a militarist fantasy and a distraction. We're not going to the stars, so let's fix this planet before wrecking others. 

And yet… to escape the atmosphere at huge personal risk, whatever the motivation, remains noble, even admirable. That those days are over is both sensible and terribly, terribly sad. Trapped on this planet with only Jeremy Clarkson for company… what a terrible fate to befall humanity. 

Atlantis - lost once more

The last space shuttle has landed, and none will ever blast off again. You know that I'm a shuttle sceptic: better, safer, more practical vehicles have been and will be launch, and it's noticeable that the Russians, who have a cheaper, safer system, built and abandoned a shuttle.

But: the shuttle was beautiful, and brave. Here are all the missions it undertook, including those which cost lives.