A Beginning and an End

China successfully launched the first piece of its upcoming space lab on Thursday.  Named Tiangong 1 (Heavenly Palace), it is intended to serve as a testing base for space technologies that China will need in the future.  This makes China the third country to successfully have launched their own space station, following Russia and the US.  The station module is currently unmanned but will see several visitors in the coming months including China's first female astronaut.

In other news, the Tevatron shuts down for the final time tomorrow.  After nearly 25 years of operation, it has seen its last ion particle beams.  Tevatron bridged the gap between the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider and the building of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).  With the closure of the Tevatron the US will lack a high energy particle collider on the scale of the LHC, meaning that US particle physicists interested in high energy collisions will have to go to CERN to do their experiments.  The Tevatron itself may be recommissioned as a muon collider making it one of the first in the world to collide leptons at super high energy.

Last Shuttle Roll Out

Today's APOD highlights a historic event in human space flight. After 30 years NASA's successful space shuttle program is coming to a close. With the shuttle fleet aging, it was decided to retire the remaining fleet with STS-135 being the last one. Atlantis will carry her four person crew to the ISS on July 8th, barring any delays.

So what is next for human spaceflight after the shuttle? Well Russia has been using its Soyuz capsules for now on 50 years. This will be the primary vehicle to get into orbit until a new system is developed to replace the shuttles. With the Constellation Program canceled, NASA has moved to a program which will be reliant in the future on commercially developed launch vehicles. However, until these vehicles are ready the only way to get to the ISS is via the Soyuz rocket. Unfortunately, no clear plan has been put forward as to what to do with human spaceflight beyond the ISS. Proposals have included going back to the Moon, landing on an asteroid and landing on Mars.