I’ve been known in the past to be down on the Space Shuttle. After all, it is incredibly expensive, unsafe, and never lived up to the promise inherent in the name “shuttle”. But there’s no denying that it’s still a spectacular machine that, for better or worse, has been the face of human space exploration for 30 years. July 8 is set to be the final launch of the shuttle program, and the Atlantic’s photo-blog “In Focus” has a beautiful pictorial history of the shuttle that is well worth checking out.