Rumi Nations

I was wondering about all this recurring delays afflicting the final flight of Discovery. And I thought people are choosing to remain silent about a massive elephant in the room. It's a very commonplace and predictable issue really. Imagine a circus company that has been performing shows for 30 years and now has only two or three shows left to perform before bringing the curtain down permanently. Or, imagine a factory manufacturing cars that has been doing it for the past 30 years but is now on the verge of being closed in a couple of months. Clearly, there would be a lot of churn going on in either that circus or that plant. I think that's what is happening with NASA as well. Many of the people are probably going to lose their jobs once the shuttle program winds down. The lucky ones will move to different projects inside NASA. Applies to internal NASA employees as well as contractors. So, probably contractors are being faced with a situation of their best and most talented em...

And I am not talking Arthur C. Clarke kind of science fiction. "A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space," according to a New York Times article here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/science/space/08nasa.html?hpw Arthur Clarke has of course envisioned high-rise buildings going all the way up to geostationary orbit at 36,000 kms. Well, I would not be around to witness any of that ... Which is just as well because I don't have the brains either to develop something like that ... As each generation gives way to the next smarter generation, humans will eventually acquire the smarts to realize what might seem today to be crazy dreams. But then the cellphones that we find to be so commonplace today would have seemed quite magical one century ago ... same goes for airplanes. There's no reason why people won't go to Mars for their ho...