July 27, 2005

Give It Up.

OK. Thanks for all the pretty pictures, and the Hubble, and the moving (mostly tragic) moments.

It's time to hang it up. Finally.

Yahoo News Service/Via AP SPACE CENTER, Houston - NASA said Wednesday it is grounding future shuttle flights because foam debris that brought down Columbia is still a risk — and might have doomed Discovery if the big chunk of broken insulation had come off just a bit earlier and slammed into the spacecraft.

Norbizness said it better than I can:

As somebody who grew up in the aeronautics-laden community of Clear Lake, south of Houston, and who loved going to the Johnson Space Center's old visitor center to look at Gemini spacecraft and moonrocks, and who personally witnessed a Space Shuttle lifting off from Cape Canaveral in 1982, and who was semi-traumatized by the Challenger explosion in 1986 (the day after my 13th birthday) which killed a few parents of classmates of mine, and who loves space-based documentaries like For All Mankind (Criterion Collection), and who is fascinated by astronomy and interplanetary research, let me be the first to say the following on the day of the Shuttle's re-return to space:
Shouldn't we have killed the Shuttle program over fifteen years ago? What the fuck? It's like watching those washed-up choads from INXS trying to get a new lead singer! Or trying to repair a Fiero after it's been through three engine overhauls! What's the point?
I wish everybody up in the sky right now a safe and successful mission, but let's move on to some visionary 21st century goals for space travel and research (and no, going back to the moon doesn't count), and get NASA some new R & D money so it doesn't turn out like Norma Desmond, watching her old silent pictures.

I wasn't born, or lived, in Houston or near Cape Canaveral. I can't claim to have any geographical, familial, business or direct connection to the space program. I have two vivid memories: first, I remember one of the space flights (must have been one of the Apollos) doing a space walk on the old 1970s TVs as my sister took her first steps. Second, I was walking around the halls of my high school when the Challenger exploded, and remember sitting around the radio with the head of my high school (just a few of us science geeks) listening to the coverage.

NASA has been the forgotten child of the massive military budget explosions of the 1980s and 2000s. It's heyday was a good thirty-five years ago (not coincidently, when initial planning for the Space Shuttle got started). It hasn't had any sort of real executive or congressional support since then. It's due.

Space, man, it's still the final frontier. Nothing else really means as much. Human genome? Brain chemistry? Screw it, let's go to Io and really see if their is life under the frozen oceans.

Posted by baltar at July 27, 2005 07:43 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Science


Comments

Uh oh.

Posted by: bink at August 1, 2005 11:34 AM | PERMALINK
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