When I flipped on my TV at 3:45 this morning to see if anyone was covering the landing, all I could find was a mess of infomercials, a rerun of the previous night’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and some talking head blathering on about the debt ceiling. That speaks volumes about this whole situation, doesn’t it? Thirty years ago, all three major broadcast networks (this was before Fox, of course) devoted hours to the comings and goings of the space shuttles. Today people have other things on their minds, like Magic Bullet blenders and which political party is more effectively holding the nation’s economy hostage with their maneuverings. Fortunately, though, I had the Internet to turn to, and the NASA TV website. I got the live video feed up and streaming just in time to hear the double sonic boom as Atlantis homed in on Kennedy Space Center.

I’ll be honest, I was feeling pretty anxious as I sat there alone in my home office in the wee, dark hours, surrounded by an empty house and a silent world. I had this irrational fear that in spite of all the checks and inspections, something was going to happen to Atlantis as she re-entered, or as she touched down, and the whole damn shuttle program would end on a note of tragedy and ignominy. But no… it was a perfect landing, as smooth as a high mountain lake on a windless day. The only way it could’ve been better was if the sun had been up. There’s not much to see during night landings until the shuttle crosses the threshold of the runway and gets illuminated by the floodlights. Oh, NASA tries to make things interesting with night-vision cameras and a feed from the pilot’s heads-up display — and I’ll admit it is kind of neat to see the runway lights rising up out of the darkness through the cockpit window — but for this last, final, ultimate landing, it would’ve been really wonderful for Atlantis to be gleaming a triumphant white in a blue sky as she coasted past lush green swamps and waterways flashing like mirrors. C’est la vie, I suppose.

The last space shuttle came to a complete stop at 5:57:54 a.m. EDT, or 3:57 here in Salt Lake City. I continued to watch until 4:20, even though nothing was visibly happening. (I remember being so impatient as a kid watching the coverage of the early missions, because I expected the astronauts to just fling open the shuttle’s door and hop out immediately after landing, the way my various fictional space heroes did. I had no idea what was taking them so long!) As odd as this may sound, I was simply enjoying the sight of the orbiter resting on the runway, her details gradually filling in as the sky brightened behind her. There were lights in the cockpit windows, shining out with a warm amber glow, and the scene reminded me — rather incongruously — of those idealized paintings of woodsy cabins after a long, successful day of fishing. I found myself imagining the mission commander walking around beneath her, inspecting and admiring his ship while enjoying the cool, moist air on his skin and the warmth and smell from the coffee cup in his hand. Or perhaps I was imagining myself doing those things. For a moment there, I really wasn’t sure.

I couldn’t stay up until the astronauts disembarked, as much as I wanted to. The sun may have been rising over Florida, but it was still practically the middle of the night in SLC, and I had a long day of work to look forward to, and a concert tonight that will keep me up late again, and I don’t sleep as much as I ought to anyhow. So with a half-smile that was a mixture of sadness and satisfaction, I said my goodbyes to the space shuttle Atlantis, clicked off my computer, and went back to bed for a couple hours. And as I was drifting off, the DJ in my head served up a fragment of an old song, Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind,” a line about deadlines and commitments, and a mood of being resigned to an unadventurous adulthood even while your spirit is still yearning for something else…