Still Endeavouring To Launch

The liftoff of space shuttle Endeavour on STS-127 was delayed again last evening. Again, weather was the culprit. NASA plans to try again tomorrow evening. The bad news, of course, is that stormy weather in the late afternoon and early evening is quite common in Florida summers.

These repeated delays clearly give NASA critics room to say the agency is not up to its job-- and to question the value of manned spaceflight. NASA does need to get better, but we should undersrand a big part of getting better would involve developing better technology, which would argue for increasing the NASA budget, not holding it steady-- and certainly not cutting it. The argument over manned versus robotic missions goes beyond the scope of this blog entry, but perhaps it comes down to added value. Astronauts recently finished the final repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, hopefully giving it a few more years of productive life. At this point in history, only humans in space could have done that. On Mars, the robot rover Spirit, now stuck in some kind of soil, is about two miles from its landing site after traveling about five miles in five years. A human expedition could cover that distance in a day. A human working from a base on Mars could free a trapped rover much more efficiently than we can from Earth. Both manned and unmanned programs, often reinforcing each other, have a place in a serious space exploration effort.