CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — "After a fiery ascent that turned night into day, space shuttle Discovery and its crew headed to the international space station on Sunday to rewire the orbital outpost.
Astronauts will spend Sunday in orbit inspecting the shuttle for potentially critical heat shield damage. Discovery will dock with the space station on Monday, and the intricate work will begin. Three complicated spacewalks are planned to rewire the space station from a temporary to a permanent power source."
Smell that? Take a moment. Open your window and take a deep, deep breath...
That's the disintegration of two billion dollars of your money. Sent to the space station that was designed just for the shuttle to have a place to go to. And the shuttle was designed just to get to the space station, and neither have generated any income, nor conducted experiments that cannot be done on terra firma, or for a fraction of the cost using alternative methods. In a few years the shuttle as we know it will be mercifully scrapped, and it's retro time as we return to the Apollo-like capsules.
And this from a devote space-buff, okay? A guy who dreamed of visiting Mars after reading Burroughs. Now, it's a fallacy that private enterprise can do things better than the government can, but it's a working fallacy and thats all that counts. Given the restrictions and oversights and undersights and hindsights and soccer-mom-sights, ANY entity would be as hamstrung as NASA. But we'd be blissfully unaware of most of the goofs if and when the government would permit private companies to exit the planet with such aplomb, and if say General Motors was in the shuttle business each launch would cost a tenth of what we pay to keep this white elephant parked. NASA has been presented with copious studies from outfits that are dying to take the job over. They'd build then launch a working spacecraft for a lot less or not get paid, and guess what?
It'd actually be able to fly.
With clouds in the sky, even.
No comments:
Post a Comment