It is not the West alone which continues to launch mankind into the unknown void. It began that way, but currently there are Chinese, Indians, and Japanese participating with their European forebears. Someday they may surpass us in these endeavors. There are but few glaring global exceptions.

The intelligent world powers will not cease in their innovation, invention, and improvement. Only the United States will be left behind, or rather held behind, by a personality so pompously assuming to greatness in spite of itself that it finds no contradiction in making grandiloquent speeches from a teleprompter that would not have been invented but for the space program’s advances.

As he has stated in his own words, our vainglorious leader sees not a valuable vehicle for progress through continuing development. Instead, he makes an abruptly degraded departure of viewing NASA’s mission not as a scientific endeavor, but a means “to reach out to the Muslim world.”

Perhaps when they have finished performing clitoridectomies on women and decapitating unbelievers, just as they have been doing since the 7th century, these Arabs will nurture an interest in rocketry.

Likewise dubious is whether their sub-Saharan neighbors will stand to remind them, having enough difficulty merely maintaining the advanced society which was bequeathed to them by their now departed “oppressors.”

For us, the dream of space is ended. For them, it will forever remain just that—a dream.

It was Western hands, stretching wide from the Volga to the Rio Grande, which erected such a marvel, and it was African hands which wrenched it down.

The final space shuttle to launch is named Atlantis and this is but fitting.

Someday, perhaps as soon as the next century, prognathous brows will rise to the musty masterpiece which once conquered the stars and with sloe eyes will stare with a sallow, mystified wonder.

To these latter-day heirs of a now postdated civilization, the exploits of this more recent Atlantis will be as much a myth as the sunken isle of antiquity.