Last night, the Space Shuttle Endeavor sat perched atop a Boeing 747 at Los Angeles International Airport.  It spent the whole night atop its winged friend waiting for a crane to pluck it off the back of the 747 so it could being its final mobile journey to the Science Center in downtown L.A.

For the Shuttle, the coming years (and even decades) will be ones of quiet solitude as a tourist attraction and symbol of the once mighty manned American space vehicles.

Americans now have to buy seats off of other countries if they want to get into space. The lagging budget for NASA has fallen in part due to the recession, and also because of greed and misunderstanding.

Of the hundreds of members of congress, none are scientists. Therefore, it is extremely hard for federal branches of the government such as NASA and the EPA to get funding.

Space exploration, and even space tourism in some cases, has been left in the cash filled hands of private businessmen and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Richard Branson.

This exciting new turn of events could actually mean stronger and more determined space programs.

New designs for space shuttles are already in design by these companies, most notably the Hawthorne based SpaceX..

Until these designs become a safe reality, however, the world will have to be satisfied with the decommissioned Endeavor: a small black and white speck on the tiny blue dot.