It goes without saying that for many pilots Spaceflight is the top of the pyramid, the apex of a career in aviation, the sum of all that is technically possible.

If you think that flying near the speed of sound is an exhilarating experience imagine to sit on a flight deck and travel twenty five (25!) times faster than that while your spacecraft is heating up to temperatures as hot as the sun. That makes your average fighter plane look like a Dinky Toy!

Two more Space Shuttle flights and the western world will not see a human spaceflight for a long time. Avery long time. The dream will be dead and with it all the passion and adventure that made the world, at the end of the sixties, tremble with anticipation while Neil Armstrong descended the ladder of his Lunar Module. Damn I wasn’t even born then and still get goose bumps when I see those images.

Funny thing nobody remembers the second lunar landing while Apollo 13 pops up to everybody’s mind thanks to a movie or, if you were alive then, the memory of the excruciating suspense that maybe, only maybe, three astronauts would die in the cold deep of Space.

And there lies the problem with human nature, and in particular the modern western mind, that we forget things too quickly. Once we achieve our goal we set it aside and take a nap only to be awakened from our torpor when disaster strikes. The Space Shuttle is a perfect example. And there is no substitute for it! Well, yes, on paper, a few mockups and an already adapted Apollo/STS launch pad but… that’s it.

And nobody looks surprised too!!! Until the Chinese will send – in a few years if you ask me – a group Taikonauts to the moon and then, and only then, we will react by pointing fingers and finding the scapegoat who made this all possible.

Aviation, a relative of spaceflight, is no much different. Wally Shirra, one of the first 7 American astronauts, said once that the Wright Brothers built a powered glider and that modern airplanes are no more than a pimped version of that thing. Plans to build better flying machine are there but in the end, like spaceflight, nobody wants to pay……first of all the passengers.