God's Shuttle?

From Pat Flannery:
A while back I posted about how space colonization fans treat the idea
like some sort of religious cult; you want to read something that shows
that mindset to a "T", read this CBS article about the last Shuttle
launch, biblical quotes and all:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/...20081298.shtml

"He took not away the pillar of cloud by day."

Perhaps if NASA had named one of the shuttles 'Moses', then that one
and only Israeli astronaut would not have been smotened from the skies
over Palestine.

I have seen many things happen in the space program where science has
fallen short in providing me with satisfactory explanations. Consider
this morning's final landing on the 42nd anniversary of Apollo 11's
'Giant Leap'. Is this a sign that Doug Adams is in control of the
universe? Ok, that one would be as easy for mere mortals within NASA
to plan, just like Viking 1 landing on Mars on a similar anniversary.
Now how can it be explained that the first shuttle launch happened on
the 20th anniversary of Gagarin's flight? Science would say that it
was mere random coincidence. Or perhaps it too was planned, where the
scrubs and delays, including that frantic scramble in the SAIL lab to
determine that it would be ok to launch, was all choreographed by
people.

Possible.

But there are plenty of others that require explanation as well. The
biggest example I've highlighted here in the past is from one of my
conversations with Neil Armstrong. I asked him how he would account
for the fact that the first ever observed comet impact in our solar
system, Shoemaker-Levy 9, happened over the span of the 25th
anniversary of his Apollo 11 mission. He gave me the answer that "any
good scientist" would give: he attributed it to random coincidence.

Can such incredibly long odds *really* be found to be satisfying?
'Yes', many, if not most, will say. So then what happens in 2009
during the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11? Another comet impact on
Jupiter.

There is a program cleverly titled, "I don't have enough faith to be
an atheist". These, to me, are perfect examples where (in my own
assessment) it would require a greater amount of faith to maintain a
position of atheism than it would to seek an alternative explanation.

How can it be explained that the only two orbiter destructions
throughout the entire program spanning 30-years of shuttle missions
happened when a highly distinctive crewmember was on board? The first
teacher, then the first Israeli. If such events were to happen
randomly, then it if far more likely to have happened to a far more
'mundane' crew. And when you add to that the fact that parts of
Columbia were strewn over a town named 'Palestine', I am again
catapulted into a region where the level of faith in atheism gets
stretched to my breaking point.

For these reasons, and many more, I for one am not so quick to dismiss
the hypothesis in "God's Shuttle".

~ CT