If the assholes keep the empire rolling along, there will be a president who chooses to use the space program as vehicle for his/her launch in the polls. But it won’t be any of this mob.
These guys can’t administer something as straightforward and sturdy as a military machine without pulling the wrong levers and getting a bunch of gears grounched and chewed.
Something like NASA where sure there are more capable engineers than the military machine has, still requires much more finesse to run. NASA is an incompetent bureaucracy but many of the people within it are extremely capable and work by monitoring and modifying as they go along.
Now the current NASA administration causes them enough trouble and that administration is a pretty evolved meeting of the creatively capable with the hidebound rule makers and number crunchers.
So can anyone really imagine what the output of that machine called NASA would be if a mob of blokes that can’t let the military machine function without constantly throwing sand into the gearbox got involved.
“What is this about 4 O rings? Treasury says that their experts tell em that these O rings are theoretically capable of 5 missions before replacement and you want 4? Why that is enough for 10 missions when your project plan says you can bring the project in with 8 missions”.
“But 2 O rings is only enough for 5 missions and even that is only theoretical secretary Rumsfeld. What if . . ?”
“Don’t you dare what if me Griffin! What if the sky fell in? We deal with realities here, not namby pamby what if’s.”
“Don’t you forget there is what if it happened and what if it didn’t happen then there’s what if happened didn’t happen as well as what if didn’t happen, did happen. Am I making myself clear? Good. Now listen to me this is the plan I used to win level 4 in Space Tycoon 3.”
“Now don’t fret, we will send all the equipment for the most important experiments first. The ones that prove the earth was created in 7 days. Your President in concerned to ensure that this entropy theory is shown to be just that a theory and a wrong theory at that. The first missions will also carry the new experimental surveillance equipment. Once we have all that up there, then those liberal global warning pinko scientists can take their experiments up.”
“But Mr Secretary, sir what i. . .I mean the shuttle might crash, what to we tell CNN then?”
“Well your President has though about this long and hard son. He said to me that he feels God has spoken to him and said that many of these experiments as you call them, our president calls them devil worship, are cursed. Damned by our loving god. If that is the case we can’t be wasting taxpayers money on the devil’s work. Especially if our Lord sees fit to teach these heretics a lesson. think of the waste! So we shall tell the amerikan people that the accident was no accident it was God’s will and because of that we will no longer trust the agents of the devil in lab coats that hide their spells under their plastic pocket protectors and from now on all experiments will have to be approved by Bishop Patrick Robertson who will make sure that NASA only does god’s work.”
“Pat Robertson Mr Secretary? . . What does he know of astro-physics?”
“Mr Griffin, you should know that Bishop Robertson’s church has just bought a controlling interest in the Russian space program and he has given my blind trust some very good options. As well did you know the Oral Roberts University of Pedophilia, Child Molestaion, and Family Values awarded the Bishop an honorary Doctorate in Physical Education? See! He does have a physics degree.”

Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 4 2006 11:27 utc | 4

I read about this the other day and got that same queasy feeling.
I’m sure that one reason so many of us (I mentioned this to annie, beq and conchita) a few days ago, before the first attempt was delayed due to weather, wonder if some disaster of this sort would be acceptable “collateral damage” in the Bush Junta war on Americans is that they are wildly flailing, through their foaming mouthpieces, to try to “unite the base” by means as desparate as the travel article calls to hunt down journalists and their children.
But maybe they’re just trying to do the space program on the cheap.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 4 2006 14:39 utc | 6

shuttle is a bigger version of the firecracker. i heard aerosmith was going to play at canaveral just before launch. what better way to celebrate an absent god and the-domination-of-nature-is-the-domination-of-humanity than by ejecting a 10 billion dollar sparkler into the night sky? shiny interface distracting from the impossible mystery of the universe required for the humiliation of Man. like a dirty windowpane obscuring a view of the full moon. the moon is so boring.
You know you gotta
Really have a good time
You know you’re really gonna
Really have a good time
Suckin’ up the moonshine
Up underneath her clothesline
You know you really gonna
Really have a good time
You know you really wanna love me
‘Til the sun can’t Get It Up

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 4 2006 16:40 utc | 8

Remembered overhearing some time ago that Bush never has liked the Shuttle program at all, and that he doesn’t consider he has a personal stake in, and, could care less about its success, at all. Says he wants to focus on space travel, probably about as strongly as he wants to cure Aids in Africa, or keep New Orleans dry.
Call me superstitious…

Posted by: bcf | Jul 4 2006 17:50 utc | 10

b- yahoo had an article the other day that noted if the space shuttle was a total mess, the astronauts could go to the space station while NASA guided the damaged shuttle home.
but then, yahoo also took a story about an asteroid and gave it the title of something like “near miss” when scientists said there was no danger. But in a War of the Worlds news enviro, I guess “Mars Attacks” is better than real news.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 4 2006 22:34 utc | 12

The Shuttle program is beginning to look like the Mir program did almost 10 years ago.

Posted by: lea-p | Jul 5 2006 0:10 utc | 14

In between stints as a computer consultant, riding on the crest of the inevitably damped-into-log-e-curve business cycle, I’ve often flipped into civilian defense contract IT-ing, to bridge the gap between no unemployment for the self-employed, and the mortgage and car payments.
I was lucky enough to work on Reagan’s Space Based Laser program at Livermore, when even a monkey on crack could surmise that the thermodynamic energy flux created by an in-space mega-laser pulsing had nowhere to bleed off to in the vacuum of space (e.g. a Thermos bottle meltdown). When I pointed that fatal flaw out to our pod leader, I was summarily told my IT services were no longer needed. Caveat emptor. When I tried to use that engagement on my CV, recruiters told me there was no record that I ever worked there, or the SBL program had ever existed. Brilliant Pebbles.
I was lucky enough to work on Ford’s Liquid Sodium Breeder Reactor program at Santa Susana, when even an orangutan on smack could surmise that testing an experimental liquid sodium reactor within the city limits of the City of Los Angeles, directly over an earthquake fault which shortly after caused the incredible damage there, posed no little risk, and required a Creosine amount of graft to local political officials to ignore the permitting issues and look the other way. Carpe Dium. This time I tried to joke my way through it, teasing our pod leader with malicious tales of secret tribunals and crimes against humanity when the program was discovered. He showed me the gate, and tore up my ID badge with purple-faced rage. When I tried to use that engagement on my CV, recruiters told me there was no record that I ever worked there, or the FTTW reactor test program ever existed, although some years later a civil lawsuit over radiation deaths at the facility was quietly settled.
And I was lucky enough to work on Bush Sr’s Anti-Ballistic Missile Kill Vehicle at Vandenburg less than a decade ago, when the public was being told by then General Schwartzkopf the Patriot missiles were the greatest thing since sliced bread, until a classified report stated that Raytheon had intentionally set the altimeter on the Patriot to explode the warhead at precisely the altitude the incoming Scud missiles broke apart by G-forces in any case. Instead of a “perfect record”, they were credited with only one kill … shooting down an allied aircraft. So our job was to write the programming to advance-test the infrared proximity detector for apogee intercept, fooling around for six months pre-calculating the “test” ballistics to simulate an actual launch to intercept, even though it was all script-programmed. Still, they couldn’t hit the birdie! One of their first launches, they even forgot to arm the ignition circuit! Splash $10M in missile hardware. This time so many people were asking what the hell was going on, and so many billions were going up in smoke, it was like coke of the 80’s, what the military likes to call a “cluster”.
That job I just walked away from, and then came 9/11, the program deployed to Alaska where it’s still sucking $10B’s for white lab coats to play space science fiction, and North Korea is still launching its test missiles anyway, with no intercepts on our part. Oh, did they forget to remind citizens of that in the media? That BILLIONS and BILLIONS (to paraphrase Carl Sagan) of our taxes were spent over the past FIFTEEN YEARS on the Patriot EKV program, and the Patriots still can’t hit the birdie?
So when NASA says Herr Bush wants them to launch an entirely unnecessary shuttle, to justify an agency that sucks off $28 BILLION every year with only a blind Hubble and a monkey cam on Mars to show for it, well, gotta tell ya, we’re being stroked. Hard.
Cracked foam endangering seven astronauts? Who the fuck cares! There are 150,000 brave kids of ours abandoned in Iraq and Afghanistan, watching the Macy’s fireworks on a black and white TV in a mess tent in some bum-fuck green zone while real mortars and real RPG’s are doing a “rockets red glare” around them each and every day. And there are still 500,000 former citizens of New Orleans watching the shuttle launch on some internment camp in the MidWest somewhere, never to go home again.
When they tell you it’s all lies, they’re using that phrase not for hyperbole, but for simplicity. If you knew the depth and breadth of those lies, the pyramid bonfire of your tax dollars, the Ponzi of debt being registered in your name, to your bank account which they are now closely watching, and listening, and scanning, you’d be unable to do the one thing, the only thing you’re programmed to do.
“Whatever you do, don’t stop shopping.” George Bush Jr. his first 9/11 speech.

Posted by: Nasa Sucks | Jul 5 2006 5:43 utc | 16