Congress will not help NASA fly sooner. Quite the contrary.
Maybe the point wasn't driven completely home with Challenger, but it certainly was with Columbia. It certainly seems that the senior management gets it. Whether it has filtered down to everyone involved ... it's a bureaucracy, and it probably never will, but there are some changes.
It's kind of like getting an old car and redoing and redoing it again. Some of it is 40 years old and some of it is last week's technology. It's a strange hybrid.
I think we're going to fly a year from now.
When the station was initially conceived, it was meant to do everything if they'd let the artists go crazy, they would have had the Starship Enterprise docking with it.
The space station was sold to Congress for decades as a lab to do this kind of broad-based research. Now they've started gutting the station just when it is at the point of being able to do all things it was supposed to do. That leaves the purpose of the space station as something for astronauts to fix.
Is this the right message to be sending to taxpayers in America, Russia, Europe and Japan -- that it's OK to do a stunt like this?
It wasn't a shortage of ideas. You could walk through NASA with double-sided sticky tape and wait 30 seconds and you've got 15 new ideas, or notions of where we should go.
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