Return of the White Elephant
The countdown has started again for Discovery’s launch. Visit the official NASA site for the latest. I must admit that I not a big fan of the shuttle. It’s cool looking and all and I was happy it was able to serve to refit Hubble, but it really seems to have fulfilled the prophesy of Gregory Benford who once called it a “white elephant” at a sci-fi convention near here.
A quick look through the mission plan seems to be a series of self-supporting activities for the Shuttle and that other useless platform (the space station). Don’t get me wrong – I realize that this is the first mission since the disaster and we need to be able to deal with the dangers, but it’s time for some better technologies already – this is a 1970′s design with 1980′s tech. I *love* the idea of human’s working in space, but can’t we do better than this old POS? I think the main problem is that we have an administration that didn’t watch Star Trek. We’re supposed to be at warp 5 by now!
