[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060...lantis_spa.html :

"Under orders to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, NASA plans to cancel shuttle Atlantis' next scheduled overhaul and mothball the ship in 2008.

"Rather than becoming a museum piece, however, Atlantis will serve as a spare parts donor for sister ships Discovery and Endeavour to complete assembly of the International Space Station.

" 'People are already calling us and asking us can they display one of our orbiters in their museum after we're done. I'm not giving anybody anything until we're all agreed the station is complete and the shuttles' job is done,' shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told Kennedy Space Center employees during a televised address on Friday.

" 'We're going to keep (Atlantis) in as near flight-ready condition as we can without putting it through a (modification and overhaul) so we can use those parts,' Hale said.
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Jeffrey Bell has recently finished a piece for "SpaceDaily" proclaiming that the wholesale cancellation of other NASA projects in the FY 2007 budget to keep Shuttle and ISS going is actually just part of Michael Griffin's Machiavellian strategy to get both of the cancelled, by making it clear that they can be saved now only at the cost of a swarm of other projects (including Bush's lunar program) which are now more popular. Certainly that is the overwhelming message being conveyed, whether Griffin planned it that way or not -- I haven't seen a single newspaper editorial yet that favors retaining Shuttle at this point.

(Bell also claims to see other, subtler evidence of this strategy in Griffin's moves over the last few weeks -- and also signs that he definitely plans to throw ISS from the train as well, by just giving it to the Russians half-finished in a few years and paying off the ESA and Japan for their unlaunched space lab modules. These include the fact that he's cancelled work on the unmanned cargo variant of the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will be necessary to take up replacement Control Moment Gyros to the ISS after the Shuttle is no longer available.)

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Well, I guess I'll have to stay "provocative" without "ranting", which will be an interesting balancing act.

Frankly, I'm a little baffled that I've set off such indignation here. Go to virtually any political blogsite on the Web. THERE, by God, you will find ranting. Most political blogsites serve not as a site for reasoned debate, but as coffeeklatches for people who already had the same ideological belief to congregate and stroke each other's egos by agreeing with each other, in much the same way that troops of chimpanzees cement their social ties by grooming each other. Occasionally a member of another rival ideological troop comes over and challenges the blog group, at which point there is much screaming and jumping up and down and throwing of sticks until the intruder retreats again. Two nights ago I read the suggestion that the main achievement of the Web will turn out to be the extent to which it's made it easier to assemble lynch mobs on a worldwide basis, and I'm afraid he's right. But the extent to which the members of this particular group are upset by any forceful comments at all -- by anyone, with any belief -- seems to me to have a certain Girlie Man quality to it which I really think we can't afford intellectually.

[mcaplinger]

Well, I guess I'll have to stay "provocative" without "ranting"...

I don't take issue at all with the crux of your argument in this thread; I agree with some parts of it and not with others. What I object to is that you rarely acknowledge that anyone else's insight has any validity or adds anything to the discourse. You're pretty well convinced you're right about most things, and for you that's usually the end of it.

Of course, the rest of us might learn to just read your messages without responding, because your initial messages are usually worthwhile at least at some level, the subsequent responses unfortunately less so. I try to follow that strategy as much as I can, but sometimes, like now, I can't help myself.