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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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1 February 2003 - 11:43 am
I'm running late this morning so I this post will probably be expanded on later.
Anyway, I'm sure you've all read about the space shuttle by now. If not, check out CNN or the NY Times. It's a bit eerie that this happened the week of the President's state of the union address. You'll recall the rumor that Ronald Reagan's desire to talk to Christa McAulife in space during his state of the union address was one of the reasons that top officials at NASA pushed to have the Challenger take-off go as scheduled even when the engineers knew it was unsafe.
Also worth mentioning is the International Space Station. There are still three people up there, which argues against grounding the entire shuttle fleet for a year, like they did after the Challenger disaster. Although there is an emergency Soyuz module docked on the ISS and Russia could probably be persuaded to go get them (possibly at a cost of $20m per person).
I have to wonder if NASA's new "smaller, better, cheaper" policy migrated over from the unmanned missions to the manned ones. NASA is under some tight budget constraints these days, and you have to assume that there is a threshold below which they can't safely send astronauts up. I wonder what the congressional response will be? Hearings, of course. But in the end NASA's budget will either go up or down. I'm hoping for up. It seems a bit macabre, but I'm kind of hoping that this will get people interested in the space program again.
Okay, now I'm really late. More later.
Posted by on 1 February 2003 at 11:43 AM
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