clyde@ut-dillo.UUCP (Head UNIX slave) (12/04/85)
Come on now, the real worth of the Shuttle is that it keeps man in space! The future of humanity in space is NOT in communications and spook satellites, it is being out there ourselves, and that is what the Shuttle does for us. This reminds me of the narrow-mindedmess I saw after the Apollo project when the Congress (led by Proxmire and Mondale) were trying to shut NASA down, and much of the anti-space station noise I hear. It is unfortunate that the exploration of space must be 'justified' in economic terms here in the West. The Soviet Union needs no such excuses, and so has already had several versions of a 'space station' orbiting and has done a lot of planetary exploration. As long as there are idiots who would rather spend money on dairy price supports than on exploring the universe, the latter will always have to justify itself in terms of the former, and will not always succeed. The Shuttle may not the best way to get what is needed done, but that is what we have (and we are lucky to have gotten it). The chances of NASA prying any money loose for the next generation of Shuttle (or whatever) are pretty grim, so we will be 'stuck' with Columbia, et al. for the forseeable future. -- Shouter-To-Dead-Parrots @ Univ. of Texas Computation Center; Austin, Texas "All life is a blur of Republicans and meat." -Zippy the Pinhead clyde@ngp.UTEXAS.EDU, clyde@sally.UTEXAS.EDU ...!ihnp4!ut-ngp!clyde, ...!allegra!ut-ngp!clyde