AIN Blog: Last Shuttle Flight Marks End of an Era  The July 21
landing of the space shuttle Atlantis marked the end of a
30-year program. (Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls) July 22, 2011 -
8:16am   I was born during the height of the Apollo program,
just one year before Neil Armstrong made his legendary “just one
small step for man…one giant leap for all mankind” speech, and I
have vague recollections of Skylab as the Saturn V-based
launches waned, but what I really remember is all the buzz
leading up to the space shuttle program. I recall how rabid Star
Trek fans waged a grass-roots campaign to have the first shuttle
named after the starship “Enterprise.” With no Internet and the
launch of CNN still three years away, video of its glide tests,
after being dropped from a Boeing 747, were fodder for the
evening news. (As a flight-test aircraft, NASA’s Enterprise
never went into space.)  The major events of the shuttle program
remain touchstones in my life, those moments that you can
clearly remember where you were when