Space Shuttle Tile Damage

CNN is hosting a video that provides a step-by-step explanation of what happened to the tiles on the bottom of the shuttle.

While we’re on the subject, let’s talk about the space shuttle for a moment.

What the hell are we thinking? Did we not learn our lesson from Columbia? Did we not get scared during the last shuttle mission about this VERY SAME PROBLEM?

I had the pleasure of hearing Michael Griffin speak at the Heinlein conference. He reiterated over and over again that NASA is a government agency that receives its tasking and funding from congress and/or the executive branch of our government. Neither of these bodies are competent enough to walk and chew bubblegum, so I don’t suppose that I should be surprised that we are continuing to build the International Space Station with a shuttle fleet that is nearly thirty years old.

We have forgotten that our competence in the technical arts is what has given America its traditional edge; at this point in our history, we are squandering our lead in several key industries with concerns over immigration, health care, abortion, and homeland security. America is poised to become not just the land of decadent, spoiled consumers, but also a cultural and technical backwater that is more concerned with its own comforts than pushing the boundaries of our scientific and physical frontiers.

I would argue that maintaining American primacy in the space race is the only thing that will enable a free society to develop off-planet. The future is not in government control of launch facilities and transportation, but in private companies and aerospace ventures. A free market economy operating under the hothouse rules of supply and demand will drive us to new technological heights. History has borne this notion again and again, yet we, as a nation, are becoming increasingly socialist, turning toward our government as the mother and father we should have left when we were eighteen.

The result of this is that there are astronauts in low Earth orbit who don’t know if they will be able to make it home. This is all because some bureaucrat at NASA deemed the risk of another Columbia disaster too low to consider. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity.

Consider the folks at NASA worthy of commitment.