[TomB]

I'm probably going to end up posting this on every Shuttle thread today, but it fits:

“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much or suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat”

-Teddy Roosevelt

[Tijeras_Slim]

When America stops getting back on the horse after being thrown, it stops being America.

[Man of the Right]

Publishing a quote like this is silly. To the degree that exploitation of space makes economic sense, robotic vehicles are doing it.

[tet68]

".....(a) system that is too expensive, too risky, too big for most of the ways it is used, ,,,,,,,"

Who needs the Panama Canal anyway?

[Lee'sGhost]

Hear, hear! (Or is it "Here, here?") Anyway, I agree with you both. I do, however, think we need to revamp the shuttle program. The technology is 30+ years old.

[IronJack]

I believe that is his "dare to fail greatly" speech.

I like this quote, though not from Teddy Roosevelt:

"They do not fall who dare not soar."

[SJackson]

One good quote deserves another.

I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go.
Captain James Cook

[Howlin]

You should post it on ALL the threads, not just the shuttle ones.

[Hegewisch Dupa]

I hope that does end up posted on every thread. Thanks for finding that quote - I only wish it would sink into the heads of the clowns who use tragedy as an excuse to forward their no-NASA agenda. But I have little hope - you can lead a horse to reason, but you can't make it think.

[HardStarboard]

>>>“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much or suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat” -Teddy Roosevelt <<<

BUMP for TomB's thought. This is net net what Bush is saying.

[Zebra]

So true. This author is a jack ass. And how about Don Nelson. His "I-told-you-so" tirade included this complaint:

If nothing else, he said the space agency could have equipped the shuttle with a crew escape module that would enable the astronauts to survive even the disintegration of Columbia 40 miles above the earth. Nothing came of Nelson's efforts. He blamed that on "NASA culture," but the agency attributed it to money limitations. Preliminary estimates said an escape module would cost as much as $4 billion. From Reuters story, today.

Not to devalue human life, but think about that statement. Why not put parachute pods in all airplanes? You could probably pull that off for a few hundred billion and you could save hundreds of lives a year. Manned space flight is a risky business! It will always be so. Despite horrific failures like Columbia, I believe the NASA culture is safety first, tempered with a rational and reasonable understanding that you cannot eliminate all risk and that $4,000,000,000 for an escape pod dooms the program, budget-wise.

I'll bet next week's pay that if you polled the astronauts and engineers, they would say "screw the $4 billion pod" and move on to find better designs to obviate the need for escapes.

Nelson's harrangue reminds me of the EPA regulations that cost business millions to fix a ten cent problem that no one was aware of or cared about until a career bureaucrat wrote a memo speculating that this-that-or the other thing was a menace.