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Forum:	Space Shuttles - Space Station
Topic:	Charles Krauthammer: Discovery's Final Flight

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Your Reply: HTML is ON UBB Code is ON Smilies Legend	[QUOTE]Originally posted by Robert Pearlman: [B]Bolden pretty much covers the standard retort to the oversimplified argument Krauthammer puts forth, but there's one point that I think is uniquely suited to this community that deserves its own rebuttal. <BLOCKQUOTE>[i]Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march. The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.[/i]</BLOCKQUOTE> Krauthammer isn't alone in making this analogy — I heard reporters make similar remarks while covering Discovery's departure from Florida — but he and they are wrong. Museums aren't graves and to suggest such is an insult to the Smithsonian and many other fine public institutions that preserve our history. The space shuttle program was going to come to an end at some point. Whether it was 2011 or 2020, the orbiters were going to be museum-bound, as they are now. The timing doesn't influence the role the museums play. Further, and perhaps more egregiously, it is a rather tone deaf analogy given that two shuttles did in fact put 14 astronauts in real graves. I'm about as enthusiastic a defender of the shuttle as there is, and yet it's inescapable that the shuttles were never inherently safe to fly. But if Krauthammer is determined to use the funeral analogy, then he has the order of events wrong. The funeral, if indeed there was one, was last August, when the shuttle program came to an end. The burial was when the division within NASA that was the Space Shuttle Program ceased to be. Discovery's final flight and its induction into the Smithsonian? That was, to use an overtly religious reference in deference to Krauthammer, the [i]resurrection.[/i] Before leaving Washington, I visited the Udvar-Hazy to see Discovery on display and marveled at the crowds that had come out to see it. These weren't uninterested museum goers, they were engaged spectators. They had come to see Discovery, but more so they came to learn. I had intended my final visit on this trip to be a private one; just some time to reflect on my own past experiences with Discovery but I found myself in the middle of an impromptu Q&A session with other visitors. Their questions ranged from the history of the vehicle to the future of space exploration. Such things don't happen in cemeteries. They are commonplace however, in the venues where people seek enrichment: universities, libraries and most certainly, in museums. [/B][/QUOTE]
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