Shuttle launch today

Merely a delay. They'll get around to risking the crew's lives and billions of dollars tomorrow.

 

But maybe the skies will be clearer tomorrow?

 

Yeah. The part I hate the most is how they take these poor kids and force them to ride that damn space shuttle. What a joke. This is all Bush's fault.

 

That's exactly what I meant. After all, everything boils down to a two-party political argument. :

 

Typical Bushie hot air: set a pie-in-the-sky dream-castle objective, underfund the present-day program and create a lot of shuffled priorities and mixed messages. He can't spend money on NASA (virtually the entire program outside the shuttle program, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the most effective scientific instrument in the history of the human race, is being shut down), because he has to throw hundreds of billions of dollars away in Iraq.

You know why we quit the Apollo program when we did? Because Shrubby's spiritual grandfather, Tricky Dicky, Darth Dickcheney's mentor, had to spend billions of dollars on Vietnam, years after he promised he'd have us out of there. No money to go to the moon, we have to pay for those Cambodian dike-bombing missions.

Bush might as well have set a national goal of landing on the planet Krypton by the year 3000.

 

Unbelievable.

 

Star's rhetoric is a bit over the top, but he's dead right on the facts. Anybody who thinks Fredo's Mars mission was anything more than something to get him through a news cycle has been asleep since 2001.

 

T-minus 60:00. Let's see what happens.

 

Like many at NASA, I'll have my fingers crossed, hoping luck is on the side of the shuttle and its crew. Luck is about all NASA has to rely on these days.

On a related note, that Nixon movie will be on later this afternoon. Nothing about space, but lots about Cambodia and Vietnam.

 

Because we are all explorers, starting with the earliest homo erectus who crossed the mountains to the next valley and continuing right through the ancient Macedonians, Greeks, Romans and Polynesians and on through Columbus, Marco Polo and right up to today. The eternal question "What's out there?" is one that defines humanity.

To quote one of the best lines from one of the best television shows I ever watched: "We have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the line of ancestors behind us saying, 'Make my life have meaning,' and to our inheritors before us saying, 'Create the world we will live in.' I mean, we're not just holding jobs and having dinner. We are in the process of building the future."

 

I'm as big an astro-geek as there is, but I can't figure out . . .

. . . why the most complex machine in the world is dependent on 3 inches of FOAM and whether that FOAM will hold up.

. . . why weather plays such a large role in these launches. These things carve through the atmosphere at 25,000 mph and are bombarded by gamma rays in outer space. Heck, Apollo 12 was struck by lightning and got its platform restored with the push of a button, yet these launches are scrubbed because . . . of a little RAIN?

. . . why the launch window is so tiny. We're not trying to rendezvous with a comet hurtling through space at 37,000 mph; we're going to visit the International Space Station, which is orbiting as it has done every day for years. Yet today's "launch window" is something like 2:31-2:38 p.m. All those engineers can't figure out how to get to the Space Station if the thing launches at 2:55 instead?



??? ??? ??? ???

 

Except we ARE just holding jobs and having dinner.