Loss of Columbia

As an American living abroad, I can only send my sincerest condolences and best wishes and prayers for the families affected by the disaster.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

"Michael Wolff" wrote:
>
> With respect, Mark, I feel I need to disagree on that point. The
> romance surrounding space exploration is still quite evident. If
> a problem exists it can be found in the way space exploration is
> handled and funded.
>

The term 'Space exploration' is a bit misleading as far as the
Shuttle is concerned, isn't it? No Shuttle has ever been further
from the Earth's surface than the distance from London to Glasgow.
In fact, if you think of a model of the solar system with the Earth
scaled down to the size of a tennis ball, the Sun about a kilometre
away and the moon about two metres off the Earth, our microscopic
Shuttle model hasn't been more than about 3 millimetres off the
surface of our tennis-ball planet.

Shuttle astronauts aren't really 'space explorers'.

James

James Gibbon wrote:

>The term 'Space exploration' is a bit misleading as far as the
>Shuttle is concerned, isn't it? No Shuttle has ever been further
>from the Earth's surface than the distance from London to Glasgow.


Admittedly a minor point. By itself the Space Shuttle is simply a means to
an end: a way of getting scientific payloads into orbit and beyond. The
Hubble Space Telescope, Galileo, Ulysses, the SPARTAN series, the Magellan
Venus Probe . . . all have relied upon the Shuttle to make the first step in
their journeys. Not to mention the components of the International Space
Station which, it could be argued, is a necessary stepping stone for the
continued exploration of space.

Michael



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