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Only at a place like the DemocraticUnderground would people be worried about stuff like this....

Hillary Clinton has decided to vote against John Roberts. Earlier I had suggested that she was the real bellwether of the Democrats. I had predicted she would vote for Roberts because, as Michael Corleone would say, It's the smart move....

NASA administrator says space shuttle was a mistake

Any good "hard" science fiction fan was capable of making this analysis. Among others, rocketeer Homer Hickham, author and main character of October Sky retired from NASA and wrote a novel titled Back to the Moon in which NASA is given a pretty good black eye for having become moribund with bureaucracy and political correctness.

Latest in this feeling that NASA had lost its direction comes from no less than the NASA chief administrator himself:

The space shuttle and International Space Station ? nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades ? were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth. ?It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,? Griffin said. ?We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.?

Reading between the lines, it appears to the Chief that NASA needed more von Braun and less Rube Goldberg in its design philosophy:

Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, ?My opinion is that it was. ? It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible.? Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, ?Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.?

Sounds like we finally have a NASA chief worthy of the name after too many bureaucrats, program managers and barely-disguised political hatchetmen, and not nearly enough engineers in the lead. Hopefully now the Congresscritters will give Griffen the support needed to get us back on the road towards the stars. It's absolutely essential if our civilization is to continue to exist and improve itself.

The great British magazine The Economist has an article about John Roberts in their Sept. 15, 2005 print edition [Update: Here's the link; subscription required]:The nominee pleases almost everybody One of the surest ways to guarantee high drama in Washington...

From today's Hotline: NEBRASKA: Who's The Fairest Of Them All? The GOP nomination "appears to be wide open" as GOPers "try to determine which of the candidates has electability." Many party activists at the GOP State Central Cmte meeting this...

From Rush Limbaugh: The money sound bite is from Lieutenant General Russell Ragin' Cajun Honore. He has a press conference. (sigh) I guess I gotta play all of these. I don't want to play all of these. I got four...

Battlestar Galactica, one of the few television series that I watch regularly, finished up with its summer finale tonight. Season two didn't pack quite the same punch as season one did, for the following two reasons: Too many Baltar -...

I seem to have offended Chad at the CCK by my recent post. Chad and I have been reasonably cordial to one another, which explains his comment, addressed to me, that I was the sane one [here at SDP]. Fortunately...

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