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n_kitson
Guest
The following is an editorial from today's Wall Street Journal:<br /><br />Way Too Many Astronauts<br /><br />By HOMER HICKAM <br />August 10, 2005; Page A10<br /><br />The test flight of the space shuttle Discovery accomplished several major goals, including a safe landing. Unfortunately, it is still not a reliable vehicle and never will be. You simply don't place a fragile bird at the base of a big, quaking nightmare of rocket engines and a massive, debris-shedding fuel tank and get anything but an engineering debacle.<br /><br />As that great American philosopher Kenny Rogers once said, "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em." That's not just smart poker. That's smart engineering, too. When your design stinks, Engineering 101 says admit your mistakes and go back to the drawing board. I would like all top NASA managers to read the following words very carefully: The space shuttle is a Rube Goldberg contraption that is never going to be reliable no matter how much money, time, and engineering careers you throw at it. Thank you for your attention.<br /><br />This is not the fault of the present generation of NASA engineers. Most of the ones I know have wanted to retire the shuttle for a very long time and build a reliable spaceship worthy of our country. But any time these engineers have suggested this idea over the past decade, they've had their heads served up on a platter and told to get behind the shuttle. They've even been branded as having a special "culture" that is dangerous and (dare we say it?) risky. This is, of course, a lot of hooey. There may be a failed culture inside NASA but it does not include its engineers. Maybe it includes the people who agreed to build the International Space Station with a vehicle that is notoriously unreliable. Any engineer would have been happy to run out a simple statistical analysis that would have predicted a problem.<br /><br />I confess I love engineers. I believe they are the true heroes of this country. They d