Message posted by Andre' M. Dall'au on July 09, 2011 at 7:21:40 PST:
For better or for worse, regardless if the STS was a poor excuse of a manned space program, we now do not have a man-rated booster and viable manned space program. As a nation we can no longer place our own astronauts in space. Not just the moon or Mars but even low earth orbit. Think about the greatness we abdicated simply because of weak vision and poor politics. JFK challenged us to be great "because it was hard" and we met the challenge. We had virtually no computers, composite materials or technology to support a space program but put men on the moon in less than ten years with a loss of life LESS than the STS. The "steely-eyed misslemen" are long gone replaced by a diverse bunch of PC NASA engineers that simply forgot to change metric figures in
to standard values and ran a probe into Mars at full speed and was surprised when a shuttle was lost because they dismissed the damage that an impact of a piece of insulation could cause. Maybe it is better that NASA is going to be a shadow of its former self typified by Gene Krantz, Neil Armstrong and John Glenn. All great minds and great men. Now we demand less and that is what we get. Much less. I guess at least now we won't have poor, production-based decisions that cost us Challenger and Columbia. RIP NASA.
In Reply to: Re: OT - Last Flight Out posted by Mark Lincoln on July 08, 2011 at 15:41:45 PST:
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