2006-07-04

Discovery

Congratulations to NASA on a beautiful Fourth of July launch of Discovery, OV-103.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And the shuttle makes it back in one piece. So, now there'll be the 3-4 launches a year to get the station finished and the Hubble repair project done before it is retired and money can be put towards the new shuttle.

Anonymous said...

Excellent! This is wonderful news!

Anonymous said...

Well I don't think there'll be another shuttle. The shuttle that NASA has now is actually a pretty good implementation of a very bad concept.

All NASA is doing now is circling the Earth and doing no science at all so cutting US manned spaceflight for a few years isn't actually likely to do any harm and if it prevents NASA from having to cut back science while making more money available to CEV development then more science will have been done and the CEV will be more likely to actually be built. I worry that the retirement of the shuttle will be delayed again and again because the Shuttle and ISS will suck up the money that was needed for the CEV as well as NASA trying to cram too many flights in to complete ISS when they can't (and when it is just a waste of money anyway, better to walk away than to keep throwing money at it, the parallels between Space Station Alpha and the Alfa class submarine are striking).