Joshuah Bearman (HuffPost): Put a Cork in It

[Dudley_DUright]

After one delay already, Discovery may try to "de-orbit" early tomorrow morning. "Or Wednesday," say NASA officials. I'm sure the sweat is pouring, from brows both at NASA and in Discovery's cockpit. Everything's on the line, for the agency and the astronauts. I'm sweating just thinking about it. When the topic came up with my dad, a physicist at JPL, his response was: "All I know is, if I was up there, I'd be putting a big freaking cork in my ass!"

I'm not sure what that means, but Pops was once almost sent to Houston to train as a payload specialist (i.e. astronaut), so I have to take his word, however confusing it may be.

Corks or not, the one certainty about the shuttle is the uncertainty of its future, even with the safest homecoming. Discovery's space-borne drama has caused NASA to suspend future flights -- rightfully so. And not because of the safety issues, which is a red herring. As my dad pointed out, the shuttle is such a complicated piece of equipment, there's no way to make it 100% safe: "There are 4 giant pumps in that thing, each delivering 20,000 gallons of liquid oxygen per second. It strains the limits of engineering in every flight. The trip is so punishing the shuttles have to be almost entirely rebuilt after each launch. It's almost a miracle they get off the ground."

But that's not the reason the shuttle should stay on the ground. NASA should get rid of the shuttle before the shuttle gets rid of NASA.

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