SPACED OUT ANCHOR LEFT IN THE ROUGH (Aaron Brown-CNN)

New York Post ^ | 2/05/03 | ADAM BUCKMAN

[theFIRMbss]

>Clothes make the man.

Last night, on Fox [!] Neil
Cavuto did a sincere
editorial

supporting NASA,
in which he advised us all
to remember how

successful NASA
has been "...sending space probes to
other galaxaies."

[Guillermo]

How about when Al Gore called the Editor of the Washington Post to point out that a picture of the earth was printed "upside down" on the front page?

Earth to Al: there is no up or down in space. Maps are orientated the way they are because of tradition, not due to a scientific reason.

[CyberAnt]

"a gigantic globe...rotating backwards"

That says it all ........LOL

[theFIRMbss]

>"Astronauts are test pilots, and about 1 in 25 missions statistically has gone bad. This was Columbia's 28th flight."

Well, the space shuttle
had been billed as a space "truck."
It was intended

as a work horse. Not
a cutting-edge test platform.
Calling the pilots

"test pilots" mixes
the metaphors. Secondly,
highlighting the count --

twenty-seven flights
for Columbia before
its crash -- forgets that

Challenger only
made nine flights before it blew.
People supporting

NASA are spinning
facts, just as NASA critics
are spinning their facts...

[FreedomPoster]

Are you trying to "speak" in haiku? It's completely underwhelming and unlikely to get you taken seriously around here.

I don't understand where you're going with the quibbling over numbers. I haven't researched Pournelle's numbers, but he's generally a reliable, informed source in this area. Also, there have been over 100 shuttle flights, with two failing, so it's more like 1/50 for the shuttle fleet. Fleet numbers make a lot more sense for analysis in this case, since all shuttles share common major system components, like the SRB's and the external tank.