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Last week NRO reported the number of hurricanes hitting each state in the past 104 years: Direct Hits, 1900-2004 Florida 64 Texas 38 North Carolina 29 Louisiana 27 South Carolina 16 Alabama 12 Mississippi 9 New York 9 Connecticut 8...

The National Association of Broadcasters named Rush Limbaugh the Network Syndicated Personality of the Year:PHILADELPHIA - Rush Limbaugh of Premiere Radio Networks was named the Network Syndicated Personality of the Year at last night's NAB Marconi Radio Awards Dinner Show...

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.

Have you ever noticed how life starts to slow down after the first day of Autumn? We've had some beautiful fall weather the last few days here, and this weekend was mostly cloudy and somewhat chilly. But with that comes...

The Husker game on Saturday drove Brent Musburger to drink. Unfortunately, he was riding in a car leaving the stadium while doing it. ABC Sports broadcaster Brent Musburger was ticketed Saturday after police caught him with an open container of...

From David Limbaugh: I believe Gen. Russel Honore's classic admonition to reporters, Don't get stuck on stupid, was one of the best lines so far of the new millennium. Part of its enduring value is its uncanny applicability to politics...

From WorldNetDaily: In his national radio broadcast yesterday, Rush Limbaugh praised a new book written by a mother to teach young children to beware of ? liberals. 'Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed' is the title of...

I just saw this on Powerline, and its way too good to pass up. Speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington, President Bush told this joke. Rabbi Stanton Zamek of the Temple Beth Shalom Synagogue in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,...

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