CORRECTION: Israel bombed IRAQ, not IRAN, in 1981, not 1980. Sorry! Memory served me wrong.
In July, the space shuttle will be launched again, and hopefully will land back on earth in one piece eventually. What a joke. That outdated contraption is about as safe as a canoe going down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. A year ago, a large offer was made to the first person who could achieve space without NASA being involved, etc. It was won handily by a sort of glorified airplane, designed by the Dick Rutan, who designed the first round the world, non stop plane years earlier, which his brother flew. The $10 million prize didn’t cover expenses, but came close. And guess what? It didn’t have to drop its fuel tanks into the ocean either, never to be used or seen again. The space shuttle, as it is called, was never a “shuttle,” which implies a routine flight like a commuter train perhaps. That absurd thing was poorly designed decades ago by government employees, who certainly lived up to their reputation. Know what a camel is? It’s a horse designed by government. That flying time bomb has had so many glitches in it, that flights have been postponed over and over again, because some ill-conceived, ill-designed, or ill-installed device has failed. I wouldn’t take a trip in that thing for all the gold in the world.
The stupid space station is equally absurd. The thing has to be boosted in place to keep it up there, and what purpose it serves is beyond me, other than costing trillions of bucks and rubles to keep it up there and its occupants alive. If we indeed did go to the moon, and I have a lost of suspicions about that even, the moon is the place to have a space station, not an absurdity a couple of hundred miles above earth. I am sure that space exploration has achieved scientific benefits, and increased knowledge about things which no one need to have increased knowledge about anyway. Does it matter to us whether the universe is expanding? Remember that knowledge about things which will never concern us, may be fun and games, but it is damned costly, and the knowledge may not be accurate in the first place. Government bureaucrats, and NASA is no exception, love to increase the size of their base, because it makes them more important and get more money, whether it makes a particle of sense or not. It seems to me that the UFO landings are of far more import than a space station or launching a non-shuttling “shuttle.”