last space shuttle

you know, when i was a little kid, in the 80s, in my father's career, the only thing i could see that was really cool was when the space shuttles went up, he often had to do field trips for his job to some satellite tracking stations to do some kind of technical kind of work for the shuttle tracking done from australia (in this case near canberra).......

i mean my father taught me a lot about math and electricity (circuit boards, resistors, capacitors, switches, etc) when i was a little kid.... but of the work he did, the only really great thing i could see was the shuttle stuff --- i liked seeing the nasa stuff he brought home like posters from jpl in california - pictures of saturn and various moons and suchlike

however, nasa has been eclipsed by 9/11...... some nasa guy was talking on the radio about the 'importance of exploring' -- hubble is great, and we need satellites and it's all good, but really, in terms of understanding space, a purely scientific line will produce purely material results (relative to satellite technology and speculating about various gamma rays, sun spots, etc) --

if i piss in the ocean and say i am performing chemical testing on the ocean's ph levels, it doesn't mean that i fathom her mysteries like that, does it?

but that's what nasa and the russians pretend to do in a sense...... although we really do need those space programs, the reality is that the won't unlock real secrets presented by the night sky

if the nasa people really were serious about exploring, not just taking photos of saturn, but really exploring, why wouldn't they essay to study what happened, on a scientific, technical level, what happened to those building on 9/11? nasa is an agency fit to take that task on... the cia isn't really

one mystery of 9/11 was the still liquid hot molten steel literally WEEKS after the fires were put out..... when i went to see the 9/11 site in nyc a few weeks after the event, there was STILL SMOKE rising....... even in NOVEMBER there was liquid molten steel.....

sure you can use that as an excuse to overthrow saddam hussein and impose democracy on iraq -- and try it in afghanistan

but it doesn't mean saudi terrorists did that --- and the media have lost all credibility becoz of it

people from nasa that talk about wanting to 'explore' and risk lives to 'explore' cannot be taken very seriously in this light