This Friday, July 8, at 11:26 a.m., the Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to roar into space on its 33rd flight. It will spend more than a week in low Earth orbit, tending to the needs of the International Space Station. When it returns to Earth 12 days later, it will be the last time an orbiter returns to Earth. NASA’s Shuttle program will be over.

This day has been a long time coming, but the delay has done nothing to answer what our future in space entails. NASA has no rocket to replace the retiring Shuttle. Congress wants NASA to head in one direction, the White House in another, and the space agency is caught in the middle.

And yet, despite all this, I still have hope for the future. This isn’t the first time our space agency has been in a tight spot.

The Shuttle’s promise

We were in much the same place in the 1970s, in fact, after the last of the Apollo moon missions. It would take almost a decade for the first Shuttle to be developed, designed and finally launched. Columbia rocketed into orbit on Sunday, April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.

The Apollo launches were gripping spectacles, but very expensive and clearly meant for a specific purpose. The Shuttle would change all that. Billed as a “space truck,” it was a jack-of-all-trades, making access to orbit routine, launching every few weeks and, being reusable, saving the taxpayers a bundle of cash. It might even usher in an age of space tourism!

Alas, no. Being the most complicated machine ever built, it was plagued with technical issues. Instead of dozens of launches annually, the best year saw only eight. The cost never really came down, and total expenditures per flight added up to about $1 billion each.

And as for “routine,” well, that dream died in January 1986 when Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch. That tragic day came about due to a combination of administrative errors, hubris and political pressure, but the culprit itself was so simple it wouldn’t be believed as a Hollywood plot device: a simple rubber grommet called an O-ring. It became inflexible in cold weather, allowing superhot gas to escape from the solid rocket boosters during flight. On that chilly morning, just such a jet of gas burned a hole in the external tank filled with liquid fuel. The tank exploded, the Shuttle disintegrated, the seven Challenger astronauts died, including the first civilian ever expected to go into space, schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. The entire program — essentially NASA itself — ground to a halt for nearly three years.

In 1989 the Shuttle started flying again, and things looked promising. It was during this period that Discovery took the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, and several more missions serviced the venerable observatory. In 1999 Columbia lofted the Chandra X-ray Observatory into space. The Magellan Venus probe, the Galileo Jupiter probe, and the Ulysses solar probe were all launched on Shuttles. The massive Compton Gamma Ray Observatory went up on Atlantis in 1991, and the first components of the International Space Station were carried into space and assembled.

Then January 2003. This time, the problem occurred when the Shuttle was coming in for a landing. On its final approach over Texas, Columbia, NASA’s first Shuttle, was torn apart by atmospheric forces. Like Challenger, the culprit was a relatively innocuous component: a piece of insulating foam that fell off the external fuel tank during launch and slammed into Columbia’s wing at more than 700 mph. This put a small hole in the wing that initially went unnoticed, but led to superhot gas funneling into the delicate internal structure of the orbiter as it re-entered the atmosphere. The support structures melted and Columbia fell apart, killing all hands on board.

Again, changes were made, fixes were implemented and the program once again got off the ground. But by this point the writing was on the wall.

Ares descending

Given the expense, the inability to go beyond low Earth orbit, and the aging fleet of Shuttles, the eventual cancellation of the program was inevitable. That day came in 2004, when then-President George W. Bush announced his “Vision for Space Exploration” which included a new rocket that would be capable of taking humans to the Moon and beyond. The rocket was called Ares, and the program Constellation. The Shuttle would wind down in 2010 or 2011, and Ares would take over from there.

Despite the fanfare, trouble set in rapidly. The project quickly ran behind schedule and over budget. In 2009 President Obama ordered a review, and the results weren’t good: Getting to the Moon and Mars with Constellation would be well beyond any reasonable NASA budget. Obama effectively canceled Constellation.

This raised a pretty big stink. Congress, on the whole, liked Constellation — after all, most states have some financial stake in building rockets — and fought the White House.

Experts, however, were split: Neil Armstrong, who is highly reclusive and rarely speaks in public, supports Constellation and testified before Congress about it. His Apollo 11 cabinmate Buzz Aldrin is just as outspoken against the program, saying it’s not sustainable.

As it stands, Constellation is looking pretty dead. Some people have said that by doing this, Obama has killed manned space flight. I disagree; all the signs pointed to Constellation being a huge drain on NASA resources and possibly not the best direction of the space agency to go. Bush made the correct decision to end the Shuttle program, and Obama was also correct in looking elsewhere for its successor.

But what will this successor be? Congress has given NASA its marching orders for the rocket they want, even to the point of including in the appropriations bill actual specifications for the rocket. The timeline Congress imposed is to have an operational vehicle by 2016, but the requirements built into the Congressional rocket means it will cost so much there’s no way NASA could ever afford to build it.

So, will we ever be sending humans to space again?

Private parts

Yes, we will. But in the short run, it won’t be the way I would’ve expected.

We can always buy seats on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which still regularly launch to the space station. Perhaps sensing an opportunity, the Russians recently increased the price of such tickets, upping them from $56 million to $63 million per seat. The official reason cited is inflation, but one wonders. Still, no matter what the cause, flying on the Soyuz is pricey and unlikely to get cheaper.

However, a new contender — actually, a series of them — has stepped in: the private sector.

Elon Musk is an Internet entrepreneur who made his fortune as a co-creator of PayPal. He used his wealth to start Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX for short, which went from an idea to actually launching their first Falcon 9 orbital rocket in less than a decade.

The Falcon 9 is currently undergoing testing to meet NASA’s stringent man-rating qualifications, with the eventual goal of bringing humans to space in the next few years. NASA already has bought several launches from SpaceX to resupply the space station after the Shuttle retires. Musk has also just announced plans on building a new rocket, the Falcon Heavy, which will be able to lift a whopping 53 tons to orbit (for comparison, Hubble weighed 11 tons) and do so at an estimate 1/10th the cost of a Shuttle launch. Musk has been fairly consistent in his estimates, so there’s reason to believe SpaceX will be able to deliver.

Boeing, a long-standing contractor with NASA — having worked on such projects as the X-15 space plane, Gemini, Apollo and the Shuttle — also is developing a capsule called CST-100, which can hold up to seven crew and be reused many times.

Sierra Nevada is a company designing the Dream Chaser, a mini-Shuttle-like space plane that can be launched on the top of the pre-existing and highly reliable Atlas V rocket. The Atlas V is operated by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon.com, started a space company in 2000 called Blue Origin. He is notoriously stingy with releasing information, but is currently developing both a reusable vehicle and a rocket on which to launch it. Richard Branson’s Virgin Group hopes his Virgin Galactic space plane will take tourists into sub-orbit for $200,000 a pop.

These are not, if you pardon the expression, fly-by-night endeavors. NASA has outlaid serious money towards these ventures: a total of nearly a billion dollars as part of its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. President Obama’s NASA budget favors more dependence on private industry, while Congress overall prefers NASA develop its own booster.

If you had asked me a decade years ago if a company that didn’t yet exist would be launching rockets capable of putting humans in orbit by 2015, I’d have laughed at you. I’m not laughing now.

Why explore space?

NASA’s budget is about $18 billion a year. That sounds like a lot, but in reality is only 0.6% of total US government spending. In America we spend five times as much on tobacco products every year as we do on NASA.

But with space exploration we get a lot back; technology and other investments by NASA actually do pay off. Estimates of NASA’s return on investment range from 33% — not great, but not bad — to as high as 10 to 1.

There are also spinoffs from NASA technology, like advances in digital cameras, lightweight cordless technology for medical equipment and power tools, and product improvements from golf balls to solar panels to a host of medical advancements such as digital breast-cancer biopsy technology. And, of course, there are weather, communication and Earth-observing satellites . . . all of which support a vast chunk of our economy. It’s difficult to measure all the direct monetary benefits we’ve reaped from space exploration, but it’s clearly substantial.

It’s fashionable to say the Shuttle program was a failure — too expensive, too limited. But progress is not a steady curve. Not all steps are leaps.

At the time the Shuttles were proposed, small, lean private companies able to build rockets like SpaceX didn’t exist — but these companies owe their existence to the environment NASA helped create.

Things are different now, however, and the era of something like the Shuttle should be behind us. The Shuttle missions were billed as routine, but NASA shouldn’t be doing the routine. The role of our space agency is to innovate, invent, design, push the limits, cross the borders. And once that’s done, once it becomes routine, they should hand it over to others.

Let private companies take over low Earth operations, and let NASA be free to pursue literally loftier goals. What the President and what Congress want isn’t all that different, and we shouldn’t let inaction leave us with no vision. NASA’s future does depend on the decisions made in the next year or two. If nothing is done, then nothing will get done.

If all goes according to schedule, Atlantis will touch down on July 20 — the very day, 42 years ago, that Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon.

How long will it be before we see something like that again?

Phil Plait is an astronomer and writer of Discover Magazine’s Bad Astronomy Blog. He spent a decade working on Hubble, and watched in 1997 as the Shuttle Discovery took a camera he worked on into space.