R
radarredux
Guest
I guess Space Daily has replaced Jeffry Bell with John Derbyshire. His latest op-ed piece The Folly of Our Age: The Space Shuttle (which is actually listed as "Shuttle News") makes Bell look tame.<br /><br />Some of the quotes:<br /><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This grotesque, lethal white elephant - 14 deaths in 113 flights - is the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age.<br />...<br />None of which is any reason why the rest of us should believe in it, let alone pay for it. There is nothing - nothing, no thing, not one darned cotton-picking thing you can name - of either military, or commercial, or scientific, or national importance to be done in space, that could not be done twenty times better and at one thousandth the cost, by machines rather than human beings.<br />...<br />To abandon all euphemism and pretense, [the Columbia astronauts] died for pork, for votes, for share prices, and for thrills (immediate in their own case, vicarious in ours).<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>