I want to go back to the future

That was the space shuttle, in the popular imagination, a perception in which the experts encouraged us to indulge, reinforced by the sci-fi fantasies, both utopian and dystopian, in the comic books and cinemas of the 1950s and the 1970s. The reality, as it turned out, was more Dark Star than Dan Dare. From the first launch in 1981, the shuttle programme limited itself to rather more prosaic concerns, inhibited by truncated funding and a president whose interest in space was largely limited to an absurd and unworkable system for destroying Soviet nuclear weapons. The space shuttle got off the ground, but never terribly far.

For a country that had accustomed itself to the chutzpah of middle-aged men playing golf on the moon, almost certainly as a prelude to planting the Stars and Stripes in the fizzing methane ocean of some weird and distant galaxy, the shuttle was a comedown. And one forced upon the US government and Nasa by those economically straitened years of the late 1970s, when populist politicians would look at the shimmering retro flare from the old Apollo booster rockets and see only millions of greenbacks going up in smoke.

And so the shuttle never quite caught the public imagination, no matter how many times it blew up

The shuttle was an attempt, primarily, at this newfangled and politically correct thing, recycling, largely for reasons of cost. It matched the lowered expectations of the times, just as American car drivers, stung by fuel prices, ditched their grand and thirsty Detroit-born chariots of old, held their noses and queued up for their efficient little Subarus and Toyotas.

And so the shuttle never quite caught the public imagination, no matter how many times it blew up. Hell, Apollo made it 250,000 miles to the moon and back. The shuttle rarely exceeded the distance between New York and Washington DC; this was not boldly going anywhere, this was a timorous pootling around in the back yard.

A gentle meandering around the lower Earth orbit, often — in later years — in collaboration with decidedly third-rate countries that one would not have expected to have such vaulting ambition — the Europeans, the Chinese, and so on. I remember as a kid being transfixed by the Apollo missions. I wasn’t alone.

The missions were revered by the public because they were manned by all-American fighter-pilot jocks, because they whopped the commies (in the end, after Gagarin had scared them all to hell) and because the ambition back then seemed limitless, a leap for mankind to another solar system, soon enough, we all thought.

In the public perception, you cannot swap gazing at the moon and knowing that some of your countrymen are up there joshing around with golf clubs, as if they were members of the ultimate Ivy League frat trip, with a handful of astronauts whose names you have forgotten, floating around a space station only 200-300 miles distant and talking to ghastly foreigners. The two feats simply do not compare, even if, in the final analysis, the space station is a far more useful contribution to science.

So take a look at it, the shuttle, before it goes for ever. It does not resemble anything so cool and phallic and streamlined as a proper honest-to-God moon rocket. It resembles something that your six-year-old child brought home from their arts-and-crafts class; a roughly hewn aeroplane shape with two tubes glued on the back; a primitive idea and what seems, now, a primitive technology. Those solid rocket boosters, for example, in which the fuel (loads of small bits of Bacofoil torn into strips) constituted less than a fifth of the propellant, and most of the rest was taken up with an ammonium perchlorate oxidiser, are therefore not hugely efficient, although they do the job. These rockets were jettisoned after takeoff and the US Navy would then scour the oceans looking for them so they could glue them back together for next time.

And the need for them at all: such a lumbering and dangerous means of dragging all that weight into near-space. As one Nasa director, Aaron Cohen, put it, “Every launch was a barely controlled explosion.” And on three occasions, as we know, not controlled at all. In the early days of the shuttle, the predicted rate of catastrophe for each mission was one in nine; this eventually settled down a little to about one in 100. But even this would be unacceptable by today’s standards, given that the health-and-safety industry has more of an influence over us than Nasa these days. You think back to the early days of Apollo, when the predicted catastrophe rate was about one in three, and marvel that the thing was ever allowed off the launch pad. Hell, today you need to have the appropriate training and fill in forms so that you might be allowed to stand on a stepladder; imagine what you’d require for the moon. Back then there was imminent nuclear war to worry about; life was a little less precious.

Laika, the Russian dog that became the first animal to orbit the Earth in 1957 (Bettmann / Corbis)

And then, come a bit closer and have a look at the shuttle’s rickety old GRiD Compass laptop computer, arguably the first of its kind in the world back in the early 1980s, which until 2007 would not allow the shuttle to fly at the end of December in case the forthcoming change of year buggered up its calculations and caused the thing to blow up or nosedive into Mecca or something.

It’s only four years ago they got that problem sorted out, and some of the very old computer technology is still integral to the shuttle. They probably had a floppy-disc drive and that pingpong game for the astronauts to play in their downtime. I suppose it’s much as the Nasa administrator Mike Griffin put it in 2005: “Some things are inherent to the design of the bird and cannot be made better without going and getting a new generation of spacecraft, much as you would with an oven toaster.”

There are three problems with devising new manned space missions; first, the cost, which is self-evident. Second, the increased premium we place upon safety these days, which is related to the third — the absence of an affluent and competent military enemy to the US to serve as a spur to innovation. This is perhaps the most seriously inhibiting factor, and it ain’t going to change unless Al-Qaeda suddenly announces it’s working on a space programme (I assume their astronauts would not be wholly averse to being blown up). Worse still, we probably can’t send monkeys, dogs or sheep into space either. There would be demonstrations and Animal Liberation Front attacks and Facebook campaigns. There’s no room any more for the likes of Laika.

They probably had a floppy-disc drive and that pingpong game for the astronauts to play in their downtime

This is all depressing, I suppose, for Professor Stephen Hawking, who, back in the middle of the last decade, predicted that mankind would have a colony on the moon within 20 years and one on Mars within 40; our future, he said, lay in exploring other worlds. This has ever been the cry of scientists; according to the predictions of the more excitable boffins of the 1960s, Mars should look a bit like Bracknell by now and we should have missions on a planet somewhere near Alpha Centauri. Too bad the rest of us, with our mundane concerns and earthly trivialities, exert a drag on the brightest of our race.

But we will be exploring space in the years to come. The question is, where should we go and who will be providing the money?

One answer is Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s commercial space operation, in which very rich people pay about £100,000 apiece to be sent a few dozen miles higher than the altitude they’d reach on an EasyJet flight to Magaluf. The somewhat literally named SpaceShipTwo is, mile for mile, even more costly than old Beardie’s Virgin West Coast line, and there isn’t even a buffet car. However, it does offer its “astronauts” the chance to — I am quoting from the brochure here — “experience the sensation of weightlessness”, whereas on the West Coast one merely experiences the sensation of intense irritation as the train hangs around Rugeley for the entire day. Virgin Galactic has signed a statement of understanding and collaboration with Nasa; private finance will probably play a larger part in future programmes.

The driver these days for state-sponsored exploration is the hope of finding some form of life, no matter how insentient; a microbe, even half a microbe, would do.

The last shuttle flight has been called the “end” of manned space exploration, but there is no absolute certainty about this, only that in the near future we will be exploring space via robotic proxy.

Each putative destination has its cheerleaders, desperate to insist that we should be visiting Venus, not Mars, or one of the arid moons of our great gas giants. My favourite is Titan, which circles the exquisite gaseous hell of Saturn. There may well be a joint European and American unmanned expedition, originally intended to begin in 2020, arriving nine years later. Some scientists think Titan remarkably like Earth, but instead of seas of water, it enjoys vast oceans of liquid methane.

There could be some form of life in these — after all, people are known to live in Runcorn. Beneath the surface of Titan there may indeed be seas of real water where something might be stupid enough to eke out a living. Titan has something else to commend it: it would seem to be an enormous reservoir of hydrocarbons, something like 100 times the amount of potential fuel that exists in the Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits; one of these days there may well be a very long pipeline. It does not seem a terribly agreeable place, though. With an average temperature of -180C, it resembles one of those awful closed cities in the former Soviet Union, just north of the Arctic Circle, desolate, frozen to the core, but no vodka. The Titan-Saturn mission will send down a hot-air balloon to hang around in the atmosphere and a cheap landing craft to bob around in the methane for a bit.

This is the problem; Titan is probably our best bet for finding something interesting. The truth is our solar system is fabulously inhospitable and, whisper it, a little boring. It promised so much. It was only 80-odd years ago we thought there were canals running across Mars, perhaps for the purpose of taking Martian families on weekend breaks. But every time we look a little closer at our neighbouring planets, there is nothing. Mars, for example, resembles Arizona, if Arizona had been hit by a large quantity of nuclear weapons and then locked in the freezer for a million or so years. There is, supposedly, some water at its two ice caps. The smart money says it can keep it.

Venus, our closest neighbour, is comparatively unexplored, not least because its surface temperature is a warmish 460C, there are permanent clouds of sulphuric acid, an atmospheric pressure nearly 100 times our own, plus no decent retail outlets or leisure facilities. It is possibly true that 30 miles or so above its surface, above those vicious clouds, life might be a little more congenial — which has prompted some maniacs to talk of building “cities in the air” and insisting that Venus is a good bet because it’s only three months’ travel time away. Nah. Listen, I live 30 minutes from Gillingham and I never feel the need to go there. The likelihood is that, as technology improves and the laws of physics stay as they are, our most fruitful attempts to conquer space will come from behind a computer, at a safe distance.