Fuck .... fuck ... fuck .. fuck fuckfuck!

RT @tjic: RT @anthropocon: Look kids! A real live SPACESHIP. You'll be able to go watch it rot in a MUSEUM. #Inspiration

I did not love Shuttle.  Too big.  Too expensive.  Too government.  Too design-by-committee.  Not enough mission.  Too much 'we have a space station to justify the Space Truck that justifies the space station'.

Those wings ... those stupid wings.

And now it's all gone and we're paying a platoon of bureaucrats astronauts to train to ride to space in another country's ships in fucking Soviet designed rockets.

I am an optimist.  I believe what will come next, SpaceX or Blue Origin or whatever, will be better, will be the start of the real space age.  Spaceships and industry and bases and people in the high frontier forever and ever amen.

I do, I do, I do.

But I did love the idea of her.  An actual space-ship.  American-friggin-made.  Up like a rocket, glides home like a prayer.  Manned missions to space, an expression of the best of what we are as a civilization.

I'll miss that gorgeous complicated expensive beautiful fragile flying machine. 

You'll never see her like again.


See also here.