NASA

Okay ... I'm mad at NASA.

I've been dreaming of space exploration since I was six years old, and I picked up Robert Heinlein's The Rolling Stones. I was right there with the Stones, living on the Moon, rolling from the Moon to Mars and then to the Asteroid Belt. By the time the US landed on the Moon, I was in grade school, reading Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke, and making up my own Star Trek characters.

Dammit, we should have been on the Moon! We should have found ice there, and built Heinlein Base, and colonized the damn place! We should have been colonizing Mars by now! What the hell is the holdup!

(Yeah, yeah, I know ... but this is a rant! Rhetorical questions currently rule!)

NASA used to be filled with steely-eyed missile men, the engineers (I engineers!) who saved Apollo 13. Now, however, NASA is filled with budget- and image-obsessed weenies who could look at a big chunk of foam hitting a shuttle wing on takeoff, then say, "Eh, doesn't mean anything! And, no, you concerned NASA engineers, you can't look at the tape again! Better to endanger a group of really cool astronauts than to admit that maybe the shuttle needed to be checked out before it came back.

But ... when NASA works, it works real fine. Did you see the landing of Discovery this morning? Oh, my, did that ever rock! And they made it down safe, praise be! Congratulations on a great landing, Commander Collins! STS-114 is back home!

And now comes the really nifty part; NASA will use a crane (called the Shuttle Mate-Demate Device) to put Discovery on the back of a special Boeing 747 and fly it from California to Florida.

Once, years and years ago, when I still lived in San Antonio, I saw a piggy-back flight land at Kelly AFB. I was driving west on I-90, and, with most of the rest of the drivers on that stretch of highway that day, pulled over, got out, and watched, open-mouthed, as the double-decked vehicle landed. It seemed to move in super-slow motion, and I think it wobbled.

When I find out where the shuttle/747 will stop over, I want to go, if we can ... DaBear has never seen this phenomenon!