 [Emirates 24/7] Discovery, NASA's oldest and most journeyed space shuttle, is poised to launch on Thursday on its final mission, wrapping up a near three-decade legacy of orbital travel.
With its mothballing we officially retire from being outwardly oriented, yea, proponents of high adventure, and return to navel gazing and poring over our genealogies. We're a lot better at making movies about heroism than we are at actually doing it.
When the storied spacecraft lifts off at 4:50 pm (2150 GMT), it will mark the beginning of the end of the US space shuttle programme, with Discovery the first of the remaining three shuttles headed for retirement this year.
We don't have the money and still less have we the determination to build more of them, or even better, to build successors to them using newer technology.
The closure of the US shuttle programme will forge a gaping hole in the American space mission, and leaves astronauts to rely on the Russian Soyuz space capsule for transport to the orbiting International Space Station.
Ptui. 
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