Discovery Safely on the Ground

The STS116/12A.1 mission officially came to a close this afternoon with the safe landing of Discovery in Florida. The flight path of Discovery took it just north of Houston on it's trek to the cape. Dad was able to hear the double sonic boom as she flew in the vicinity. I was stuck in traffic on my way to East Bernard. Oh well...at least Discovery and her crew are safely back on the ground.
As mentioned before, this mission was the most difficult to date in the station assembly sequence. With that behind us, we look for the next challenge...which incidentally is every single day in the space business. It becomes a little more challenging when we do assembly tasks and fly a shuttle to the station. I suppose if you look to the future, the big challenges that remain are station assembly complete, retirement of the shuttle, building, testing, and flying the CEV (the shuttle replacement), going back to the moon, and eventually mars. Seems simplistic on paper, but there is a lot of work to do in the next 3 years (station assembly complete and shuttle retirement in 2010.) CEV development, now, testing flying by 2008, and man-rated by 2012? I think that is the time line. Missions to the moon in the late 20-teens/early 2020s. I plan to be at NASA through it all...hopefully.