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Space Shuttles Survive Hurricane Frances
maggeth writes "In an update to a previous story, NASA damage assessment teams have begun work at the Kennedy Space Center, which was hit by Hurricane Frances. It appears that there was no damage to any of the space shuttles, according to the first word from NASA. Although more details still are to be released, we know that Frances died down in strength before making landfall, limiting the amount of wind damage."
Reader knix writes, though, that "It looks like NASA did have quite a bit of damage from Hurricane Frances," pointing to an AP story which adds some detail, and noting that besides a knocked over Mercury-Redstone rocket, the massive VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building) had 1000 panels missing after the storm hit. According to the AP, "The holes left by the missing panels created 40,000 square feet of 'open window' on two sides of the building."
Give it up, the shuttle program was just a continuation of the "anything you can do I can do better" game between the U.S.S.R. and U.S., better known as "the space race". You send up a dog, I'll send up a chimp, you send up 1 man, I'll send up two, you try to land on the moon, I'll fake a lunar landing in a sound studio, you send up a small space station, I'll send up a school bus. It's really very aimless at this point, sending up men and women will always cost more than a robotic experiment or probe which can do the same thing better. There's also no point in men landing on other planets, because so far we have not found another planet in the solar system with a sufficient quantity of oxygen, which we require to survive (not to mention, food). In brief, the federal government would be far wiser to spend dollars to find more efficient ways to utilize our resources and land on this planet. They can start by finding a way to keep the goddamn neighbor kids off my lawn.
Thank you for your time.