After a span of 30 years the space shuttle program ended on July 21 when Atlantis landed safely at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The landing represented the conclusion of the 135th flight of the reusable space plane, and for me, the end of the only manned space program I had ever really known.
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.)
A lifelong aviation enthusiast who joined AIN in 2007, Curt came to the publication from the broadcast industry where he was a national science and technology television reporter and producer. He writes on the FBO field, aviation finance, and sustainable aviation and occasionally contributes to AIN sister publication Business Jet Traveler. Curt was a member of the AINtv reporting staff that won the 2008 Aerospace Journalist of the Year award for Best Airshow Daily. That same year, he was a finalist for another AJOYA award. He earned an AJOYA for Best Business Aviation Submission in 2018 and was a finalist in that category in 2021. He received the National Air Transportation Association’s Aviation Journalist Award in 2012 and won a Pegasus Sapphire Business Aviation Award for outstanding journalism in 2021.
Before joining AIN, Curt worked with Consumer Reports’ television division, CRTV, and for several local television news staffs. An honors graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University in 1995. Curt lives in New York State with his wife and two young sons.
