So the last space shuttle has lifted off and, as those
things do, will come back to earth, ending the 30-year program. To which one has to say: zzzzzzzzzz.

If that seems a bit harsh, try this little test: Quick, name the three guys on Apollo 11. Now, name the crew of the current space shuttle mission. Odds are you can answer the first question but not the second.

That’s not surprising. The space shuttle program may have lasted more than three times as long as the Apollo program, but has never quite generated the same level of excitement. In fact, it’s been quite a few years since it generated any excitement at all.

This is the consequence of turning the astronaut corps into a group of interstellar Federal Express delivery people.

For those of us who grew up during the shank of the space race, the shuttle program has been a deeply ho-hum experience. It’s basically a delivery service for the international space station, which is fine as far as it goes but doesn’t really fire the imagination.

Of course, you’d never know that by watching the coverage of the last launch. There was a great deal of awed reporting about how it was a historic thing and it was yet more evidence of the technical superiority of the United States. Of course, that was leavened by reports about how all the people who worked on the shuttle program are now out of work and probably will be reduced to living on Tang and Space Food Sticks. Yes, it was the kind of story for which the world “bittersweet” was invented. Somewhere in reporter Valhalla, Walter Cronkite is weeping.

It might be possible that space shuttle launches are just as exciting to folks — especially kids — as moon shots were, but that’s not likely.

And moon shots, especially for those of us who were kids at the time, were exciting. One of the most vivid experiences of my life was watching Apollo 11 land and Armstrong step out onto the lunar surface. There was a sense of wonder watching, in real time, a man do something that had never been done before. You’ve got to wonder what it felt like to do that and know that. (I once read somewhere that the first thing Buzz Aldrin did when he stepped on the moon was wet his pants. Aldrin apparently had a congenitally weak bladder and anyway, the astronauts wore a sort of space diaper, since putting a Porta-Potty on the moon wasn’t an option.)

Those first moon landing shots were in black and white and rather grainy, but really grabbed you by the eyes. The technology got better with later moon shots and you got a much clearer view of things like Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball. It made it more fun to watch, but there was nothing like that first time.

It was even cool to watch the moon landings when nothing was going on. The networks came up with some pretty imaginative ways to fill the time. During one moon shot, they had in the studio a topographical map of the landing site. It featured little astronauts, just a couple of inches high, who were maneuvered around it by puppeteers. I thought it was the coolest toy I’d ever seen.

But the coolest thing, by far, was just the knowledge that there were guys on the moon. There was something ineffably amazing about walking out your front door, looking up at that silver disk and knowing there were people there at that very moment. It seemed as if you could see them if you squinted hard enough.

Try that with the space shuttle. You can’t even tell where it is at any given time, much less pretend to see the crew. It’s a bigger thrill waiting for the pizza guy.

And as a kid, I was into it. My very favorite boyhood toy was my G.I. Joe Mercury space capsule, which I still have. It even came with a 45 record of transmissions during Shepard’s space flight, so you didn’t have to make silly noises with your mouth to play with it. I also had models of Ed White during his space walk and a Saturn V rocket. I wanted to be an astronaut.

It’s a vastly different world now than it was when astronauts walked the moon. There was the whole Cold War aspect to it, of course; we beat those dastardly Russians, even though they had a slight head-start on us. America was still the nation that always won; we were losing in Vietnam, but it wasn’t obvious yet. And even when things went to hell, like during Apollo 13, we could hunker down and figure out a way to bring the astronauts home. I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a while and you have to admit, along with the first moon landing that probably was NASA’s finest hour.

Even the bad parts of the Apollo program seem better than the bad parts of the shuttle program. The Apollo 13 disaster really couldn’t have been avoided. It was one of those Murphy’s Law-type of things. But the Challenger explosion was the result of poor design of one small component. In other words, incompetence.

And the Challenger disaster was used to make a hero out of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who was on board. Her death, as all such deaths, was a tragedy, but she basically died for a publicity stunt. My sympathy was always more with the professional astronauts who were on the mission, who faced the danger as part of the job every day. They were heroes; she was a hitchhiker. There also was a plan to send a journalist up with a shuttle flight, but needless to say, that was killed after Challenger.

So yeah, we don’t get to watch any more shuttle flights, but for many of us the fascination went out of the space program once it stopped trying to get anywhere. If you squint hard enough, you might still be able to see a U.S. flag on the moon. Think of it as a reminder of when the space program had a point.