Astronauts should speak up

If it were not such serious business you would swear the latest NASA
Press Conference, carried live on NASA TV, was a Saturday Night Live
skit.

The Shuttle Engineering Team, some of the nation's foremost technical
folks, declared that they are not ready to launch the orbiter Discovery
on 1 July and that more time is needed to make fixes for the insulation
problems on the external tank.

But NASA's chief administer, paraphrasing Dubya's recent "I am a
decider" utterance, announced he was over-ruling the engineers and
approving the launch date. He was quick to announce, however, that if
we lost the vehicle now, he will shut down the whole program.

Seems to me we lost a vehicle before when the warning of shuttle
engineers went into the deaf ears of NASA management. I would love to
see the astronauts join their ground-based comrades for unity and
refuse to ride until the engineers declare the mission a "Go."

AL STERN Satellite Beach FL
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FloridaMilcom/