Discovery flies past the Washington Monument. Photo by APhA staff member Chris Baker.

Today, Team APhA watched great theater from atop our headquarters as the space shuttle Discovery flew over the Washington Monument and rest of the National Mall on its way to a new home at the National Air & Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport near Washington.

I was offsite for a meeting but received tweets, photos, and phone calls from excited folks who were watching the historic event in person. As someone from a generation that watched the U.S. enter space, orbit the Earth, put men on the moon, and stretch the boundaries of our existence, today's event rekindled many great memories for me.

With the landing of Discovery, a major chapter in U.S. aviation comes to an end. Yet we know it's not the end of the book on space exploration. It will be interesting to see how the privatization of space exploration develops. We have to manage priorities with limited resources, and hard decisions need to be made. I’m not second guessing the politics of it. I just recall an old saying, “You can’t get to second base without taking your foot off first.” Unless we continue to explore, we’ll never expand the human race beyond the Blue Marble.