To boldly go?

The sun was just starting to rise over Florida when the space shuttle Atlantis came to a final stop Thursday morning, wrapping up a three-decade program that had flown 542 million miles since the first launch in 1981.

“After serving the world for over 30 years, the space shuttle’s earned its place in history,” radioed mission commander Christopher Ferguson. “And it’s come to a final stop.”

And, for the moment, so has America’s space program.

For a president who talked so much about hope, Barack Obama has given little to America’s manned exploration of space. And its not just him: A nation that once sent men to the moon and brought them safely home now reaches only low Earth orbit.

On paper, NASA’s next goal is to land astronauts on an asteroid by 2025, and then Mars in the middle of the 2030s. That’s a long time, by any calculation.

Yes, we’re facing the worst deficits and debt in the nation’s history. And yes, space exploration is expensive. (Although perhaps not as much as you think: The Associated Press recently reported that the entire 30-year shuttle program — all 135 missions — cost $196 billion, or about $1.45 billion per mission. By contrast, a recent Pentagon spending bill approved by the House for a single year was $649 billion, or more than three times as much.)

But cost has never been the defining issue of America’s reach into space; it’s the will to go. It’s the drive that sent humans across the oceans, across the continents, into caves, atop mountains, into the air in flying machines and to the bottom of the oceans. And yes, it’s the drive that sent them into space, to set foot on our moon, and, not content with that, to look even farther and ask, “What’s out there, and when can we go?”

Instead, NASA was expected to lay off 2,000 people on Friday and another 2,000 in the coming months. The surviving space shuttles — Atlantis, Endeavour, Discovery and the original orbiter that never saw space, Enterprise — will become museum pieces, like the Wright Brothers flyer, Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo capsules and a replica of the lunar lander.

For the near future, Russia and private companies will handle the business of servicing the International Space Station.

Many would argue that — with all the problems we face on Earth — exploring the solar system is a waste of time, energy and money that we simply don’t have. But that ignores the practical as well as philosophical benefits of a space program, especially one that involves international cooperation. That kind of a program could unite people and nations despite their earthbound differences, as well as open to the doors to new discoveries that we can’t imagine now.

The key? Deciding to go. When President John F. Kennedy declared the audacious goal of going to the moon within a decade — a decade! — he galvanized and challenged an entire nation. It gave America a purpose, a goal to strive for, and a success that gave the nation a sense of well-deserved pride.

Kennedy was the original hope-and-change president, but not one freed from the chains of his time. The nation faced struggles over civil rights, a growing war in Vietnam, a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union and radical changes that threatened to rip society apart after Kennedy’s assassination.

Still, America persisted, worked hard, employed its knowledge of science and launched into history.

We can do it again. We should do it again. And we should never stop striving for that next frontier, no matter the challenges or the barriers that stand in our way. The future awaits us, if only we have the will to meet it.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/SteveSebelius or reach him at (702) 387-5276 or ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.