July 26, 2005
Shuttle Blogging
Yes, I'm glad Discovery got off the pad safely this morning. But at the risk of being pelted with rocks and garbage, I really question whether it was worth it. Almost everything I've ever read about the shuttle program suggests that it is obsolete to the point of near uselessness and, by the pricking of my llama ears, I sense that this mission has more to do with politics and NASA's place at the federal trough than anything else.
My goodness, ain't I being cynical this morning? Must be the heat.
For all that, though, Godspeed to the crew.
UPDATE: Now that's what I'm talking about:
The House Friday overwhelmingly endorsed President Bush's vision to send man back to the moon and eventually on to Mars as it passed a bill to set NASA policy for the next two years.
Among other things, the bill speaks to retiring the shuttle fleet and developing new manned exploration vehicles. However, that's not for another few years. In the meantime, the Discovery launch reminds me of an old joke our rector once told:
It seems the Pope was sitting in his office one morning in the Vatican when an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared before him. To his astonishment, the angel announced that Jesus was going to appear in the middle of St. Peter's on the following Friday at noon. The Pope quickly summoned the College of Cardinals and relayed to them the good news. The Cardinals looked about them in some consternation and then asked, "What should we do when he arrives?"
The Pope responded, "Look busy."
Posted by Robert at July 26, 2005 11:25 AM | TrackBackYeah, it's a boondoggle, but it's our boondoggle. It needed to happen, and needs to be successful, if there's to be any hope of a manned mission to Mars. Which is what we all want to see.
The problem with the shuttle is that it is bad old 1970s technology. Poorly conceived and designed. They need to replace it with something more modern and reliable.
Posted by: The Colossus at July 26, 2005 11:29 AMAmen.
Posted by: LMC at July 26, 2005 11:36 AMI’m rabidly in favor of manned space exploration, but NASA has been almost inexcusably inept in pursuing that goal. As Milton Friedman once said, if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years they’d be reporting a sand shortage.
And the shuttle is a particularly egregious example of government mismanagement. I remember reading that NASA didn’t get around to upgrading the shuttle’s 1970s-era onboard computers until 1999. It replaced them with IBM 386 CPUs—three years after the 386 chip had been declared commercially obsolete.
Amen, amen and amen. And the Space Shuttle is not the only such boondoggle. The obsession with a manned station in Earth orbit has also taken funds and attention away from efforts to return to the moon and build a manned base there, which in the long run would prove cheaper as well as being more useful for extending manned exploration even further into space.
Posted by: Brian B at July 26, 2005 04:03 PM
