Space, the final frontier..

[dr_nebula]

Since it is a Wednesday, its time for the weekly SHINY post. I have lots of wildlife and mineral images, but with the final voyage of the space shuttle perhaps a 'space post' would be more fitting.

First off, my latest image of the giant planet Jupiter:

Comments

[p_m_cryan]

I don't want the dream to be gone.

[mr_spock]

Personally, I think that the reason we never realized the dream is BECAUSE the government was in control of everything. That made the whole program at least 5x as expensive as it needed to be, and slowed everything down by forcing every bit of minutia to be approved by committee before being implemented.

Don't get me wrong, NASA has done great things for our space program AND terrestrial scientific advancement. Still, I have to wonder how much farther we'd have gone without the extra noses poked into the process.

[weofodthignen]

Yes, I hope we get to go back :-( I wonder what would happen if they had another challenge to design a spacecraft, like the one they had a few years back to design a small, cheap scientific payload. But this time an "OK, what should follow the Shuttle if we could find the money?" There may well be some good next-generation launch vehicle ideas out there. Before this generation of space scientists disperses.

M