The Space Shuttle is no more. Atlantis returned safely to Earth yesterday, ending the final mission of NASA's 30-year program. The Shuttle was, as Christopher Mims aptly put it on Technology Review, "one of the most complicated pieces of technology ever conceived." It was also a triumph of design in the best, most expansive sense of the word: The STS (Space Transportation System) program literally set out to rethink manned spaceflight from the ground up. Post-Apollo, sending people into space became a design problem: not just "how," but why? Read More »

In the latest installment of the Butterfly Effect, we look at what will happen to space travel after today's final shuttle launch. As NASA struggles to keep a foothold in the space industry, it will help private companies launch more and more spacecraft, but their purposes are very different than the space agency's mission of discovery.

Fifty years ago this month, a young Russian military pilot, standing just 5'2'' tall and wearing a comically over-sized helmet that would later become an icon, was strapped into a capsule atop the Vostok-1 rocket and fired into space. His mission lasted just 108 minutes, but it turned him into the first cosmonaut--the first human to journey into space. This was 1961, and in the USSR. Here's a look at the technology they used, and how it's impacted the space programs of today.