End of Shuttles

 Today, Discovery ended its career as the world's most flown spaceship , returning from orbit for the last time.Endeavour and Atlantis will make their final voyages in the coming months,but Discovery will still hold the all-time record with 39 missions, 148 million miles, 5,830 orbits of Earth, and 365 days spent in space.All this was done in under 27 years.  NASA estimates it will take several months of work: removing the three main engines and draining all hazardous fuels before Discovery is ready to go to the Smithsonian Institution. It will make a 750-mile journey strapped to the top of a jumbo jet. Future goals are to send astronauts to an asteroid and then Mars in the decades ahead. There is not enough money for NASA to achieve that and maintain the shuttle program at the same time.So the shuttles will stop flying this summer after 30 years.

RESPONSE:
As a little child I was interested in space travel and other planets. This marks the beginning of the future of space travel. Scientists will be pushed to make spaceships faster.I was actually surprised when I actually read that they are planning to land on an asteriod. In my opinion this a bad idea( why would you want to land on something that could hurl down to another planet and kill you?), the asteriod would be pretty hard to get to.