How President Jimmy Carter Saved The Space Shuttle (blastingnews.com)

MarkWhittington writes: Eric Berger has published an account in Ars Technica about how President Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle program. The article is well worth reading for its detail. In essence, around 1978 the space shuttle program had undergone a crisis with technical challenges surrounding its heat-resistant tiles and its reusable rocket engines and cost overruns. President Carter was not all that enthused about human space flight to begin with, adhering to the since discredited notion that robotic space probes were adequate for exploring the universe. His vice president, Walter Mondale, was a vehement foe of human space flight programs, maintaining that money spent on them were better used for social programs.

Comments

Re: Carter was a great President!

[Ol Olsoc]

No, Iran contra was half a dozen years later. Do you idiots even wiki this shit?

Iran-Contra was discovered some years later. Specifically, getting arms to an enemy of the united States and to another group via an end-around in order to circumvent the Boland amendment was started as a way to attempt to get some hostages held by Hezbolla in Lebanon.

Now might such a thing have happened in the goings on in the 1980 election? Who knows? But a group that is wiling to give aid to enemies of the US, it is at least plausible that a very similar thing happened a few years earlier, merely undiscovered.

In the meantime, it was interesting that this whole thing included a metric shitload of illegal actions, like destroying classified evidence to avoid prosecutions, removing classified materials under cloathing, selling arms to an enemy of the US and violating laws passed by congress.

In the end? Acquittals and pre-emptive pardons, and the party of the moral high ground was pleased.