Far above Australian pre-occupations with the fate of an unsafe, small, low-fare airline such as Tiger, or the cutting down of Qantas by MBAs who think Asia is where the asset should be based, the most costly flying object ever built, a space shuttle called Atlantis (what was NASA thinking?) is docked like a fat dart in the side of the gigantic tubes and panels of the international space station.

The media has, as usual, totally lost the plot over this — the last shuttle mission — writing as if it was the end of a great era in space exploration, which is piffle.

Space exploration hasn’t ended, even if Congress persists with the notion of cancelling the James E. Webb space telescope, which is vastly more capable successor to the aged Hubble Space Telescope, destined (if funded) to drift into a gravitational equivalent of the Sargasso Sea, a place darker, stiller, and more useful to astronomers than any other technically plausible location in the solar system.

The pace of useful exploration, the creation of wealth in space dependent industries, and the associated activities in high speed sub-orbital intercontinental flight, a well as the patient advance towards practicable journeys to the planets and perhaps centuries from now, the stars — that all continues.

But without America.

Transport in America is in disarray, whether by road, rail or air, and this is true of its innovations in space transport in particular, which are no longer considered useful to a society where the anti-science tendency actually translates into political power, where the country is insolvent, and an angry sense of denied entitlement and bewilderment seems to infuse its major parties.

America burdened itself with the big burger approach to space. It’s scientific establishment succeeded in attaching many superbly focused and comparatively less costly programs to the periphery of manned lunar extravaganzas that were as much about massaging America’s narcissism as they were about promoting itself as the world’s leader in technology and whatever else it wanted to headline.

But the money, and the will, is gone. It has exported technological control and leadership to Europe, China, India and Brazil, which include its prime creditors.  The investment in design and engineering made outside the US far exceeds that within the country, which means Americans are increasingly buying the benefits of technological innovations their economy no longer sustains with money borrowed from abroad.

All hail Atlantis, and the glories of the past.

Tomorrow is upon us.