Space Shuttle Fun

On vacation, so things are getting posted a day or two after the fact.

Well, it looks like Discovery lifted off just fine on Tuesday morning. My family and I had a fun time watching it. Mrs. Bush attended the launch at the cape. The only problem with the launch was a chunk of foam that fell off of the external tank (third photo). Since falling foam is what doomed Columbia to fall apart over Texas, NASA's all in a fritz about Discovery losing foam. They have already grounded the entire shuttle fleet. Heh, Discovery is in orbit, but it's grounded. Anyways, I thought that they had fixed that problem but I guess not. Now I'm all happy and all that they are taking safety seriously. However, I can't help but wonder how many safe flights that the fleet has had that involved falling foam before the 2003 disaster. Then again, that's probably why I'm not in charge, yet.

Now, if I were in charge, I would propose that instead of humans we use space monkeys to fly the shuttle. It would be much more cost effective since they need only bananas as payment. Then instead of risking human life we would only risk space monkey life. It might tick off space monkey rights activists, but many of them think that space monkeys belong either in a five-star hotel or in the jungle where they are liable to be eaten. So, clearly giving them the adventure of their life away from predators while making them earn their keep would be the best way to go.

Why use anything at all? Well, while the launch is completely automated (which basically means that if everyone in Florida were to suddenly become narcoleptic the shuttle would still find it's way into orbit, I think....) the landing, from what I understand, isn't. You have to manually let down the landing gear. Something that amounts to a flying house doesn't land too well without landing gear. Just replace the lever of button or whatnot with something that looks like a banana, problem solved. Also, I don't know how well the space shuttle can dock with the ISS or check for missing tiles. So we could just like the space monkey dock and give it a midget's spacesuit with a tail sown on. The guys on the ISS could take care of the rest. The rest of the time the space monkey could be given a computer to either write Shakespeare on or to use as a toilet. After all, given enough space monkeys a successful mission will eventually come out, right? Hmm, Perhaps it's good I'm not in charge.