Friday, February 05, 2010

True Anamoly

One of my favorite blogs, True Anomaly, has shut down. The guy who ran it, Astrosmith, was a true, dyed-in-the-wool NASA supporter. Astro kept his faith in NASA long after I lost mine. but I did have the edge of not being directly involved for a longer period of time than he did.

When I once posted in his comment section about how much money and effort we had wasted putting women into orbit for no other reason than garnering a string of female "firsts", he blew a gasket and apologized to his other readers for my blasphemous* rantings. As a result, I never posted there again, although he may think I did, since another "Bob" was doing some commenting. But I did continue to visit the blog.

I still contend that all that money we spent on equipment and training for women astronauts would have been far better used for real research and development, rather than using NASA as a place for social experiment.

Astro's excuses for killing off his blog doesn't meet the sniff test. What I think is: Now that Obama has effectively destroyed NASA and our manned space efforts, Astro, after tasting a bit of bitter reality, has lost faith. Just like I did several years earlier... As I watched NASA and our space effort be hijacked by second-stringers, bullshit artists, political lackeys, incompetents and excuse makers. Astro may not be ready to admit that.

Like I said before, NASA dropped the ball by diverting funds and effort to anything other than space exploration, and that the "Teacher in Space" disaster turned an entire generation away from space.(All those kids in schools across America watching the shuttle blow itself to hell because the idiots in charge refused to listen to their own engineers on the subject of frozen "O" rings.) Hell of a price to pay for stupidity.

I predict that Astro will not stay silent long. I'll bet he'll be soon out there, fighting for a new NASA, like the one that put a man on the moon.

But first, he needs to help us be rid of Obama.

*Blasphemous is used here in the context of being irreverent towards something considered sacred or inviolable, which the "women-in-space" programs were held to be by some. Definitely not me.

11 comments:

TheWayfarer said...

Interesting.
I'm an "Astrosmith heretic" myself: It seemed that if you called a spade a spade on the illegal migration issue, it ruffled feathers.
Amazing how many people are vested in their own enslavement and destruction, but that's almost part and parcel of gubmint employment...
Sadly.

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Master Doh-San said...

Bummer. Haven't read Astro in a long while, but he was an OK guy.

Astrosmith said...

Well...can't say that I disagree with you much here, Bob.

Except that the reason for shutting down my blog has more to do with my continued gainful employment than anything you said here. And I won't say more about that.

Ted, could you remind me of what disagreement you say we had on illegal immigration?

Astrosmith said...

Oh, and on the women astronaut thing, Bob... If I recall, the discussion in the comments had gotten around to "women shouldn't be doing these things at all". While I agree that social experimentation is a poor way to run NASA or the military or any number of other things, I do not believe that women are useless or should not pursue those careers if they wish to.

And, I had one regular commenter who is a female NASA engineer. Are we going to tell her that she shouldn't be doing that? I certainly would not.

Of course, I sure wish more women would be happy with marriage and raising families instead of pursuing their empty careers...and that more men were worth such women.

And yes...we do need to be rid of Obama, along with a great number of other politicians.

Bob said...

Astro:

I agree that women in space are a necessity if humanity is to go beyond our own neighborhood.

Where I got sideways on the issue was the diverting of incredibly hard-to-get funds to create a female astronaut corps.

We should have a permanent base on moon right now. We should be exploring Mars. We should have the space plane operational.

We should have done a lot of things we didn't do. Maybe the Chinese will, or perhaps another rising nation.

I certainly don't blame the women involved, they are as dedicated and focused as any of our men ever were.

They just arrived on the scene too early, and that arrival ended up defunding some crucial milestones.

I still grind my teeth when I think of Christa and the horrible decisions that killed her. She was not an astronaut, trained and prepared to take the risks involved, just a school teacher who believed the people who told her it was all safe and "No more dangerous than a disneyland ride".

Two years lost redesigning an O-ring joint that always did it's job in the first place... Until we tried to make frozen ones work.

Of course we had primary O-rings burn through. It was anticipated and expected. It was understood that the primary O-ring could be "nicked" or "pinched" during booster assembly, but the primary O-ring, once engaged and acting as an additional assembly guide, just about guaranteed that a secondary O-ring would not be damaged. That's why there was never a back-up O-ring that failed under normal launch conditions.

And good luck on the j-o-b. I have a good idea of the challenges you are facing.

Astrosmith said...

Thanks, Bob. Rest assured that my job isn't directly involved with the Constellation program or any of Obama's cancellations. But I do believe that the time has come for me to develop an alternative career path, and that's what I'm going to be working on.

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Bob said...

I'm really getting tired of these garbage comment posts that make no sense... How does one block them?

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