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Originally Posted by John@AutoAgenda
This seriously makes me so sad to see the end of an era here. With all the waste in money this administration has squandered, the last thing I wanted to see was this program being shut down. I honestly can't belive that the USA is no longer a major player in the space program and if we want to go up we have to pay the Russians :(
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We never used the shuttles to their full potential either. Each shuttle was capable of 100 missions. The most flew on a single orbiter was 39. Discovery was capable of 61 more flights. It's not even middle-aged yet! I feel like we didn't use what we had to its full potential, and now it's gone.
They say the major reason they retired the shuttle was because of the Challenger and Columbia disaster. What's truly sad about this is that both the problems that caused those ships to break apart could've been easily fixed if NASA paid more attention.
If NASA would've scrubbed the launch on January 28th, 1986 like Thiokol Corporation said to, Challenger would've never broke apart due to the boosters.
If NASA would've allowed the astronauts to do a space walk and evaluate the damage on Columbia in 2003, they would've seen the gapping hole in the wing and NASA could've sent up another shuttle and rescued the astronauts and possible fixed the problem. If not, then Columbia would have broken up, but we wouldn't have lost 7 astonauts in the process.