Excellent article! I wish more people with experience in the NASA culture would speak out like this. It's been clear for years (since before it went up) that ISS would be a useless white elephant. The Shuttle and ISS are co-dependent: neither has any purpose at all without the other. NASA has always had a mixed mission that it couldn't fulfill. It has military goals, political goals and the odd scientific goal here and there. It's turned into a bloated mess that seems to exist only to sustain itself. I don't know if it can be saved or if we have to start over. There have clearly been marvelous accomplishments--Hubble, Viking, Voyager, many Mars missions--but they represent a shrinking portion of the NASA budget. The main goal of NASA seems to be to launch the flying turkeys once again. What will it take to get NASA out of CYA mode? Michael Here's a look at the other side of some NASA mission: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-04zh.html Note that I'm not necessarily taking sides there. Just seemed look a good piece to start some interesting debate. Patrick _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.utahastronomy.com