The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has closed the book on the Space Shuttle program, which begs the question: what is the focal point now for space exploration? Is there a still an ongoing role for the International Space Station’s (ISS) to support NASA’s space research and exploration?

Why ask these questions? Without the capability to send United States (US) astronauts to the station, how can the space station remain a realistic platform for space science?

If we are going to explore anything beyond our solar system and out into the vastness of the universe in a spaceship or probe we need some serious speed to do it. There is a tremendous difference in distant we travel locally here on earth versus the distant we must travel just to get from here to our nearest star, the sun, and beyond. We must come close to the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second to transverse the vastness of space if we want to get to the nearest star with an earth-like planet orbiting it.

The most popular current theory on the origin of the Universe states that space and time began 15 billion years ago with the Big Bang and that the Universe has been expanding ever since.
No one knows how, or if, the Universe will end.