"Soon, of course, we’ll be doing nothing at all. Faced with the fact that we are losing American spaceflight altogether, suddenly the workhorse shuttle seems as

"Soon, of course, we’ll be doing nothing at all. Faced with the fact that we are losing American spaceflight altogether, suddenly the workhorse shuttle seems as beautiful and daring as the Saturn V did in the sixties." Hard to believe this was written in 2015, while SpaceX was busy sending dragons to ISS and learning how to land Falcon 9s. Edit: the excerpt is from Leaving Orbit, published in May 2015, but written in 2009, prior to the last Shuttle flight in 2011, which explains the sense of sadness and loss.