When the black rubber of the front wheel touched down on the alabaster blanket of pavement, it was over.
Five decades (and seven presidents) packed full of planning and dreaming are now nothing more than memories to be stored.
Through good times and bad times, recession, and maybe depression depending on who you ask, the Space Shuttle was constant. There was tragedy, twice our nation wept over the loss of a shuttle. Challenger was lost on launch in 1986. Columbia was destroyed on re-entry in 2003.
Now Enterprise (just a test unit), Discovery, Endeavor and soon to be Atlantis will just be giant models for display. Other component parts have been dispatched like a NASA garage sale, an engine going here, a few of the orbiter units going to museums there.
These trophies from our limitless youth, mean little without its symbolism.
The space shuttle was another one of the things we Americans hung out hat on. A button-bursting source of pride that made us, even if just small part of us fling our shoulders back and made us proud to be Americans.
The shuttle outlasted Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, another Bush and Obama.
Disney couldn't have dreamed a plan like this.
There may be better engineered cars in Europe, so the argument goes. There may be better technology from Japan. At the end of the day, in the toughest, must unyielding test of all, manned space travel, no one, but no one can do space exploration like the good ole' USA.
We said we could do it and we did.
It wasn't just that We Did it. It was that were able to do it.
We did it first, we did it best. Some 135 times we shook our first, pointed to the sky like a contemporary Columbus and said we can do it. Then cut through cloudy ceiling feeding the fanciful notion that we American's are a special breed.
And don't let anyone tell you anything else, that's what the space shuttle was all about.
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