Rant.

This rant triggered by: Enchanting Juno. Love her blog, understand her sentiment, but damn, it triggered all my Issues with NASA.

I was home during the launch, and walked outside to watch the little flame climb into the bright, hot sky. Coincidentally, I was home the day Challenger blew up, it was a crisp, cold winter day in FL and I remember how the big cloud stayed in place in the sky for an extraordinarily long time. I was home again in 2003 when the next one was lost - home doing cancer caregiver duty for my dying husband.

I live an hour or so inland from the Cape and my life has been punctuated by launches and returns (I'm on the flight path when they land in FL, and we get double sonic booms that shake the windows and make the cats jump straight up). I've been their neighbor for 25 years and knew people who worked on the program. Back in the Day, my husband worked on one of the launch system computers and was out there for almost every launch. Both my kids did Space Camp - the one day version as a school trip, we were never rich enough or silly enough to ship their asses to Houston for a week of playing astronaut.

I am sick of all of the apologists for NASA. The shuttle program has never developed into anything more than an insanely expensive science fair project. I'm disgusted that this launch has turned out to be yet another NASA Whoopsie - 2.5 years and over a billion dollars flushed and the same frigging problem that killed the last crew cropped up again, and it's only sheer dumb luck that it apparently is not as bad this time, though you know everybody will be holding their breath until that thing is safely on the ground again. It's a measure of the seriousness of the situation that the response was to ground the entire fleet for the foreseeable future, AGAIN.

I always remember a college astronomy class in which the prof ranted on about the shuttle program as a waste of money, and explained how we learn so much more from unmanned probes and can do them for a fraction of the cost. At the time I didn't get it, but as the years passed I came to share his perspective. Each time they scrub a launch because a cloud came overhead or a bird pooped on something or, far more likely, something they spent a shitload of money to develop and swore up and down was working perfectly, uh, wasn't, it's millions and millions of dollars flushed down the toilet - the staging and setup of a launch are breathtakingly expensive. Three aborted launches could provide medical care to a huge chunk of the population, or build and equip many schools in inner cities, or...you get the idea. I know guvmint appropriations don't work that way, blah blah, but the reality is our tax dollars are doled out in various directions, and this is one with a really lousy return on our investment.

And the commercials - it's the commercials for the space center that freaking KILL me - the place is actually promoted as a theme park. We are bombarded with cutesy radio commercials, TV spots, aimed at the tourists - come look at all of our COOL SHIT! Play astronaut, buy souvenirs, you'll have so much fun! At least Disney and Universal and Sea World honestly ARE theme parks, but the Space Center is a damn taxpayer-supported government program, and the commercials just grate on me like you wouldn't believe. And if anything doesn't telegraph the significance of NASA in the War On Terra, how about the fact that we have ticket takers and snack bars in the middle of one of our "critical government programs" and are begging people to come wander 'round, we'll show you a good time?

When NASA sends up an unmanned probe that goes way out into the galaxy carrying messages and collecting data, that's cool. The shuttle program just makes me crazy. The fawning local news coverage, reassuring us all that "The shuttle will fly again!" - like we really care? - makes me want to scream. I'll be nervous until the crew lands safely, and if another one never leaves the ground, that's fine with me. The damn things are 30 years old and have never worked very well, let's just park them (we could turn them into snack bars!) and build something better that does something more useful. How about figuring out what we want to do and take the time to develop the technology to do it, like we did when we went to the moon, instead of creating missions around the equipment we have sitting in the garage? Just a thought....

Rant off. I'll shut up and knit.*

Edited slightly this morning for clarity, because even I think I was getting incoherent with disgust there. ;-)