Video The Space Shuttle Discovery's Last Mile (Video) 101
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Timothy Lord was in the closest civilian parking lot to where the Space Shuttle Discovery touched down from her last flight -- as a passenger on top of a 747, but it was still a space shuttle flying... a flight that was the sad epitaph for an American era. Timothy's shots of the landing approach are much like all the others you've seen. What's interesting is the variety of people he talked with. One came all the way from Tokyo. And there was the young man who got a Master's in Aeronautical Engineering to work on the space program, which sadly shut down, and who is now looking for a job with SpaceX or one of the other private space-bound companies. We hope there are lots of opportunities in the near future for him, and for thousands if not millions of others who want to go into space or, ground-bound, help our efforts to go where only science fiction writers' imaginations have gone before.
Re:The space shuttle is just the tip of the iceber (Score:5, Informative)
mankind is slowing down - literally, it is more or less abandoning manned space exploration, science is giving way to obscurantism, governments are slowly tightening their grip on their populations, ...
You seem to be confusing the USA with "mankind". Europe and Russia's space programs are still strong, China, India and Brazil are recent newcomers expanding their space programs, science is still strong in the civilized world and people in Europe are no less free than they were before 9/11.