It isn’t ironic that the last flight of this:
Happens on the anniversary of this:
But it is the end of an era. I’m too young for the Apollo missions, but old enough to remember when the Space Shuttle was still the promised miracle ship that would get us into space properly, back before Challenger showed us how much of this promise was just wishful thinking. The Space Shuttle was the last gasp of the idea of manned space exploration as something analogous to the discoveyr and settlement of America, something that could be done just as long as we had enough willpower and enginering fortitute to pursue it. The end of the shuttle does not mean the end of space exploration, but with its retirement the science fiction dreams of L5 space colonies with millions of inhabitants, Helium-3 mines on the moon and asteroids being melted in low earth orbit for their metals has finally gone the way of all science dreams made obsolete by reality.
So in honour of steampunk (the faded dreams of Victorian era science fiction), dieselpunk (thirties), atompunk (fifties and sixities), I’d like to propose shuttlepunk as a new genre for all those stories that still think those seventies and eighties ideas about the colonisation of space can be made into reality. First candidate as proto shuttlepunk: Stephen Baxter’s Voyage. Science fiction being what it is, I’m sure we’ll see quite a few shuttlepunk novels coming out in the next few decades looking back towards an old, discarded future in preference to inventing new ones…