2005: A Space Bureaucracy

In the aftermath, of Katrina, there is a rainbow. When the sky cleared, NASA found a wonderful new excuse. According to USA Today, "The space shuttle may not fly until late 2006 at the earliest because of technical problems and the devastation of key shuttle facilities by Hurricane Katrina,"
In reality though, according to shuttle program manager Wayne Hale, there probably wasn't going to be a flight before March of 2006 because of problems on the recent Discovery flight; and the target date was probably closer to May anyway.
Once the pride of a great nation, the space program has descended into tragic comedy, and NASA is a shadow of its former glory. This past July, the Shuttle flew for the first time since 2003, when the Columbia exploded on re-entry. The program had been grounded for two and a half years, trying to correct the problem of a new environmentally-friendly insulation foam, that tends to come loose on liftoff.
For the life of me, I cannot figure out this most recent mission of the Discovery. There seemed to be no purpose, other than seeing if they could launch it without losing any foam or tiles (they didn't). Most of the mission was spent searching the body of the spacecraft, looking for damage. If they're going to have to do this every time they launch, there's not going to be a lot of time left for any real space work. It's almost as if you had taken your car to the mechanic, and said, "I have a problem with the wheels loosening at expressway speeds," and rather than tighten them, the mechanic installs four video cameras so you can see if they start falling off while your driving.
The shuttle design is now thirty years old, and its safety record makes a Ford Pinto look like an armored car. One third of all Shuttles built have ultimately failed to bring all the passengers home. While only 1.75% of all shuttle flights ended disastrously, If the domestic airline industry had a similar safety record, there would be roughly 20 plane crashes an hour in this country.
I think that sometimes it's better just to scrap a vehicle, than to keep trying to fix it. This is a voice of experience, from someone who has spent a lot of time cursing underneath a rustbucket. While I hold no degree in astrophysics, I have left knuckle skin on many hopeless vehicles, and have drank more repair shop coffee, than most auto service managers. My advice is this: when a car gets old enough to legally drive itself, it's not worth spending money on anything more than gas and wiper fluid.
Just put the age of the Shuttle into perspective: when the first shuttle, the Enterprise, rolled out onto the tarmac, Star Trek heart-throb William Shatner was only 45 years old, and had most recently appeared in a Columbo episode. The first actual shuttle flight was Columbia in April of 1981, while TJ Hooker was in pre-production, which makes it roughly as old as the Chrysler K-Car. Could you ever imagine anybody putting a dime into fixing a K-car today? Only in a overgrown bureaucracy like NASA, would such an expenditure seem logical and reasonable. It's time to call the wrecker, and make a trip to the dealership.