Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Safe at home

Endeavour is safely on the ground. Grissom, White, and Chaffee were important to me when they died in Apollo I, as were the two crews lost on shuttle orbiters. So were these astronauts, even though I could not name them, not even the teacher.

The shuttle program is a mess of reduced expectations:

NASA has outlined an ambitious shuttle launch schedule to complete assembly of the international space station. If all goes as planned, NASA will fly 14 more missions before the fleet is retired in 2010.
Fourteen missions in 40 months does not show spaceflight to be routine, which was the goal of the program. That was probably too much to hope for.

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