The Flight of Discovery on STS-121

From the pages of Daily Kos...

Discovery's STS-121 mission will the 18th assembly flight to the International Space Station and deliver badly needed water and other supplies. It will also ferry a European astronaut who will bring the ISS crew size back up to 3 for the first time since February of 2003. The crew will also perform a spacewalk to service a malfunctioning piece of construction equipment at ISS and another to test methods of repairing the fragile orbiter heatshield.

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has bluntly stated that the program will end if another vehicle is lost. The shuttle program has been a white elephant of sorts from the day its design was finalized. Too many compromises had to be made for it to live up to its initial promise. And it wasn't as safe as many made it out to be and as 14 brave American men and women tragically proved.

The International Space Station (ISS) is another white elephant. It's in the wrong orbit and also will never live up to its hype. Studies have shown that in order for ISS to even begin to accomplish what it was meant to do would require a permanent crew of at least 7 people. To date the crews have spent the majority of their time just doing maintenance and housekeeping.

President Bush (yeah, I know) has decided that there will be no more space shuttle flights after the year 2010 and possibly sooner. This decideration was made so that NASA could focus more on his ambitious program to develop a new space flight vehicle and return astronauts to the moon, and eventually Mars. ISS still requires 16 assembly flights before it is completed and it's anybody's guess at this time whether or not they can actually be accomplished given the tight schedule. Deciding to end the program once the ISS was completed would have made too much sense I guess, but hey, what do you expect from someone whose age is about to match his IQ?

Others might speculate that his real motive is to militarize space. We must work to make sure that never happens. I take it as a bad sign that the rocket that will take astronauts into space starting in 2014 is named after the god of war. Maybe it's just me.

It's all but certain that once Bush is out of office his grand vision for space exploration will be scrapped no matter which party is in control of the White House and Congress. What emerges in its place is bound to be far less exciting. And for that I am sad. But as Discovery lifts off tomorrow I would ask everyone here, Democrats, Liberals and Progressives to think about what direction the country's space program should go in. Just start to think about it, and please try to remember that its value as an inspiration to young people all over the country from every conceivable background and culture is incalculable. Achievments in space are something the world, even the Arab world, respects and have been a justifiable source of global goodwill for decades. For what it costs to fight the war in Iraq for a week we could have something to be very, very proud of. How long has it been since this nation accomplished something all Americans could proudly point to and say, "We did that!"? Hint: the War on Terror and the War on the Constitution aren't getting it done for me.

I know many Democrats over the years have harshly criticized NASA programs. Walter Mondale almost single-handedly got the space shuttle program shut down before it ever started. The biggest criticism has always been that these programs are a waste of money and resources that could be better spent on earth where we have plenty of problems that need fixing. Mondale called it "an enormous federal boondoggle", and called Nixon's decision to build it an "example of perverse priorities and colossal waste in government spending". I wonder what he would say today about the war in Iraq and the Department of Homeland Security?