Actually, this was the last flight of Atlantis. The last Shuttle flight of all will be STS 134 with Endeavour in November.

Other than that I agree with you, while NASA may not have been the “bang for the buck”, humans are explorers and have been ever since we walked out of Africa over a million years ago. Indeed, NASA’s biggest problem the last few decades was that it wasn’t exploring.

People seem to need there to be people going out and filling in the blank spaces on the maps … to “boldly go where no one has gone before.” Even if we can’t go ourselves, we need to see others doing it for us.

But there are no more blank spaces on Earth, not really. Oh there are plenty of things we do not know nor understand, but nothing that appeals to the primitive part of our brain that walks over a hill and sees a new valley. It may not even be noble this need to ‘claim’ new territory; instead it might simply be primitive greed driving us to find new feeding grounds. But it is part of us, and I think like hunger, sex, we deny the imperative to explore at our peril.