Berkeley, Calif.

WITH the final space shuttle mission scheduled to end this morning when Atlantis glides to earth, and with only uncertainty to follow for NASA’s manned spaceflight program, this may seem like the moment to weep for the lost promise of the space age.

It is not. I have shed tears of wonder and awe at the scale and achievement of NASA’s manned spaceflight program, but not for its inexorable end. The close of this phase of space exploration is long overdue. And what appears to be an epic conclusion is, like much of NASA’s history, an elegant mirage.

In 2005 and 2006, I regularly took a long, slow bus ride from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where I was a research fellow, to the warehouse where the Smithsonian stores its Apollo spacesuits. Dry-cleaned by NASA after their return to earth and meticulously preserved since, the suits remain stained, indelibly, with gray-black moon dust. Their surface, a wrinkled study in chiaroscuro, seems alive.

One day, as I rode back to Washington, I saw the full moon rise into view. Preoccupied with earthly concerns, I was startled to tears by the vertigo of having spent the day with those moon-stained spacesuits, objects in human shape that had touched heaven and returned.