Leader: A pause after mankind's many giant leaps

YESTERDAY'S safe landing of the space shuttle Atlantis brings to a close not just a space mission, but America's 30-year orbiter programme.

The shuttle flights were instrumental in building the space station, and were used to maintain the Hubble telescope. In the words of commander Chris Ferguson as the spacecraft landed, "The space shuttle changed the way we view the world and it changed the way we view the universe." The closure of this project has brought home a deeply uncomfortable truth about the state of America and its ability to keep financing a programme which drew together not just its own citizens but the world in a compelling outward push of human exploration and knowledge.

This instinctive drive characterised the world's earliest explorers and had a profound psychological effect in the shaping of America and its frontier mentality. This impulse has driven mankind forward and it will be renewed in due course. For the moment, we seem to be in a smaller place, our concerns more tightly focused on the many profound problems facing the human condition here on Earth. Space travel will resume - in other forms and by other agencies. This is the end of a phase, albeit captivating and dramatic - not the greater drive itself.