The Broken Beyond: How Space Turned Into an Office Park

I am a Space Shuttle child. I ogled big exploded-view posters of the spaceship in classrooms. I built models of it out of plastic and assembled gliders in its shape out of foam. I sat silent with my classmates watching the television news on a VCR cart after Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986. Six years later, I worked as an instructor at the New Mexico Museum of Space History’s summer “Shuttle Camp,” a name that will soon seem retrograde if it doesn't already.

Last summer the last Space Shuttle took its last space flight, but last week it took its last worldly one. It ended my generation’s era of space marvel, which turned out to take a very different path from that of our parents. During the 1950s and 1960s, space exploration was primarily a proxy for geopolitical combat. It was largely symbolic, even if set against a background of earnest frontiersmanship. First satellite, first man in space, first spacewalk, first manned moon mission, and so on. Space as a frontier was a thing for science fiction fantasy, although we dipped our toes far enough across that border to make it clear that such exploration was possible, even if not yet feasible.

By the during launch only concretized the program’s ennui. Space exploration became self-referential: Missions were sent to SkyLab in order to repair SkyLab.