NOTW eclipses other, better space-happenings and farewells

It's a sad day today. The reasons for this, much like the reasons for the box, are threefold.

Today, I graduated from university, and it sort of forced me to realise I'm not going back there. Maybe for a few flying visits to see friends in other years or guys and gals who are doing Masters courses or (hats off to them) medicine degrees, but those three years of being immersed there are gone. It's a little more sobering and sad in that because of the university's collegiate system, and the fact that unlike at Oxford and Cambridge college places aren't largely assigned by subject, faculty or discipline, the majority of the people I graduated with I didn't know well and the majority of the people I'd have loved to have seen for a last hurrah were saying their farewell in a silly hat and gown on different days. The few who I knew well and will miss "terribly, everso" from the college were great to chat to, but if all the people I shared a trio of years with could have been there it would have felt a bit less surreal and open-ended, I feel.

So that's the mushy, soft-hearted reason number one out of the way.

Reason number two is that, sat a nice double bed in my hotel room, sipping on a nice Scotch and thinking about the day I turned on the news and was reminded that the Space Shuttle Program is coming to an end because all of the funding for missions is being pulled to be pooled into "research" instead. Because it's so much better to conduct research on hypothetical terms rather than collecting raw, hard data from specimens by going somewhere. The man with the telescope is better than the man with the microscope, apparently, even though the man with the telescope "saw" and drew detailed plans of canal cities on Mars while the man with the microscope was able to tell us that there was water under the surface as a fact, and point out where and how it got there.

This lack of interest in funding space travel for the next foreseeable decades doesn't mean that America, the bully of the world, will stop going up there though. Oh no, they just won't pay for it, hitching a ride to the ISS with their cosmonaut cousins. The arrogance of this is ridiculous- if you want to go somewhere, and you're the best superpower to do it financially, infrastructure-wise and experience-wise, bloody do it yourself. The soundbyte actually says they'll "have to rely" on other existing space programs, like it won't be the luxury they're used to. Don't demote yourself to it, then, if that's how you feel. Get Obama to pump money back in. As Mills says in Taken, "your arrogance offends me".

The third reason for it being a sad day is the fact that the aforementioned loss of the Shuttle Program was relegated to the tail end of the BBC News hour, in favour of the so called Phone Hacking Scandal (or #hackgate/ #omnigate/ #everythinggate or a dozen other monikers it's trending under) being flogged to pieces for the first half an hour, and then followed with less positive and less revelatory items all prioritised over the last mission of the Atlantis.

More important than the future of mankind in the universe?

Atlantis and the entire program deserved a better death than that which Obama has given it, and a better memorial than that which the media provided. The ratio of disinterest and ignorance afforded it by the media in spite of people's interest is astounding. As was stated in an interview with one of the Shuttle Program leaders on the Radio 4 midnight news just now, anyone "who ever admired a space shuttle has taken the journey with us".

The news is always so negative. Why not celebrate something amazing once in a while instead of treating every new little piece of information in an unfolding saga that will probably be with us in the news for months as a "revelation", and calling it such? That doesn't help in the slightest, each new line that is decoded from an email endlessly being pored over by the 24-hour rolling news culture. Put it away, when there's a bunch of news tell me, I don't mind waiting and missing the "scoop" that there were eight members of staff who had coffee with the editor on the day of that meeting rather than seven. I'd like to know what the meeting was about before I know who was there.

Chuck all that guff out of the way and pay a bit more attention to the positive things that have happened and the catastrophe that comes from the fact that some are over.