STS 131-The Last Mission

Brace yourselves; tomorrow at 6:21 am EDT the Discovery will be doing its last launch in to space from the Kennedy Space Center, en route to the International Space Station to accomplish three tasks according to NASA.

What most people may not realize is that this will be the last space shuttle launch under President Obama’s administration. Supposedly, bigger and better things lay ahead for space exploration with a new space plan.

The new space plan calls for the cancellation of the existing Constellation program, which has been overseeing the construction of new Ares I and Ares V rockets to take humans to low-Earth orbit and back to the moon.

Instead, there has been talk of a new means of travelling into space via commercial spacecrafts. Although many in the House and Senate have been strongly oppositional claiming this plan to be beyond radical, with Obama’s new budget request

…NASA would receive a slight boost in funding for 2011. It calls for the cancellation of NASA's space shuttle fleet at the end of this year as planned, but would extend the International Space Station's lifetime by five years to at least 2020.

It seems there have been some very big changes put into the works for NASA and American space exploration. Although change may be scary it seems that it is something we are going to have to get used to.