-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 9:42 PM +0000 on 1/19/03, Malcolm Carlock wrote:

I must admit it also seems very strange that the shuttle couldn't have been examined while docked to the ISS.

It wasn't docked there. It was in a completely different orbit, and higher up to boot. That's why it came over the Western United States on landing, instead of over, I believe, places like Cancun and the Gulf of Mexico. It's also why people were saying they would have been SOL no matter what happened, and why, if you're conspiracy- -- and bloody- -- minded, it's easy to imagine that someone higher up in NASA figured that they were, "heh, cooked, anyway", and decided to stand back and see if a miracle happened. Of course, that probably didn't happen (invoking Pournelle's Law), and, besides, if they *were* that bloody-minded, they would have left it *up* there for an eventual repair and body-recovery mission, sometime in the future. [If you don't think they wouldn't have, "memorial" or not, remember that two people *died* in the Columbia already, in the wrong place, the cargo bay, at the wrong time, while they were pressurizing it with nitrogen during a mock-launch rehearsal before its inaugural launch.] Flying another shuttle to them while people were still alive would have been impossible, of course, so much for a reusable "space-truck" on a rapid turnaround, and, even if it wasn't, I don't think they even have an airlock aboard, and, given the cost of the gold-plated one on the ISS, they probably can't afford one on the ground, either. In other words, when you fly on Uncle's Nickle, you pays the tax payer's money, and you takes your chances. Of course, if we'd actually *privatized* space (not had a single-payer HillarySpace program, which is the case now, even though most of the shuttle program is currently "privatized" -- in the same way that the California power market is "privatized"), like back in the Nixon administration sometime, when he drew a red-line through NASA's budget the first time because it was leftover Kennedy-cruft that was embarrassing him politically, and made stuff like liquid rocket fuel legal to own (wasn't it someone here, or elsewhere, who said maybe we should sue to make very-high-powered rocketry a constitutional right under second amendment? :-)), among other things, there probably would have been *50* re-entries, or maybe 100, today -- and just that many launches. Today's crash, if it had happened at all, would have been lost in the radar clutter, to be completely brutal about it, and it would have been buried in the place where articles about 7 dead marines at Quantico -- or, more likely 7 dead skiers in the Bugaboos -- go. Oh, well. Maybe China will finally collapse already and some entrepreneur in New Shanghai establish a colony in the Belt someday. Too bad I'll be too old to learn Chinese when it happens. Cheers, RAH Who gave up on any illusions of there ever being an American private space industry in his lifetime -- or any career plans in that regard - -- shortly after the Challenger blew up and a bunch of government employees cancelled *all* manned space flight indefinitely. Same shit, different decade... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPj8insPxH8jf3ohaEQLODACcDofKm9BtBVOQdGq/lCK9Topwt/YAoOdk NDdomx/bnf0ALLWNuJc13b0p =JY// -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'