{"id":1239,"date":"2008-12-29T23:25:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T04:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1239"},"modified":"2008-12-29T23:25:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-30T04:25:00","slug":"endeavour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1239","title":{"rendered":"endeavour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is just a quick note to say that although in the past I have counted myself a fan of NASA&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Space_Shuttle_program\">Space Shuttle program<\/a>, in recent years, upon closer inspection of the history and nature of it all, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_program\">I&#8217;ve had to remove myself from that camp<\/a>.  My dissatisfaction with the program was further consolidated this evening as I continued to watch the Discovery Channel mini-series on NASA I received for Christmas and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gene_Kranz\">Gene Kranz<\/a>, of all people, praises the program to the sky (pun intended) by calling it a &#8220;revolution in spaceflight&#8221; and an &#8220;aerodynamic tour de force.&#8221;  That sound bite just got to me.  And while I&#8217;ll concede that whatever his personal views on the issue, as a NASA man I&#8217;m sure he has to tow the line somewhat, and it was something of a revolution to have a reusable spacecraft, an &#8220;aerodynamic tour de force&#8221; the Shuttle most certainly isn&#8217;t.  It&#8217;s profoundly conservative and actually rather boring from an aerodynamic standpoint, and while the revolution bit might be true in a sense, is it really the kind of vehicle we wanted leading that revolution?  I would argue no.  More on this issue forthcoming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is just a quick note to say that although in the past I have counted myself a fan of NASA&#8217;s Space Shuttle program, in recent years, upon closer inspection of the history and nature of it all, I&#8217;ve had to remove myself from that camp. My dissatisfaction with the program was further consolidated this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}