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Nov, 19, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Spread the wealth? Jewish tradition and income equality

Elliot B. Gertel: 'Mad Men': Tackling prejudices or reinforcing them?

Nov, 18, 2008

Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn: The End of the Age of Reason

Jonathan Tobin: Does Barack + Bibi = Disaster?

Nov, 17, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The End of the Age of Reason

Diana West: Gulling Americans into making terror legit?

Nov, 14, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: The Power of Spiritual Inertia

Caroline B. Glick: The perils ahead

Nov, 13, 2008

Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: How Bush and Obama together could change the Middle East dynamic

The Kosher Gourmet by JeanMarie Brownson: Sweet and savory, crispy and meltingly tender bestilla

Nov, 12, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Tyrannical Co-Workers

Michael Doyle: High Court to consider today donated monuments that may have religious messages in public parks

Nov, 11, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Will Obama stop government officials considering institutionalizing financial jihad?

Jonathan Tobin: They Will Decide Their Own Fate

Nov, 10, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: $8 billion, modern-day Tower of Babel being built?

Barry Rubin: A letter to the president-elect from a Middle East realist

Nov, 7, 2008

Rabbi Francis Nataf: Of Children and Immortality

Caroline B. Glick: Livni's Obama strategy

Nov, 6, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: How I tricked a classroom of apathetic students into grasping the fallacy of moral relativism

The Kosher Gourmet By Gina Kim: Tips for making the perfect soup --- includes recipes

Nov, 5, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Destitute Debtors

Bruce Weinstein: 'Religulos': Bad title,even worse movie

Nov, 4, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Treasury Dept. submits to Shariah law

Frida Ghitis: A surprise for Obama in the Middle East

Nov, 3, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Who says Jews are Smart?

Jonathan Tobin: Was He Wrong About Everything?

Oct. 31, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Our Immutable Noble Essence

Caroline B. Glick: Running against Bush

Oct. 30, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: The End of the Special Relationship?

Steve Lipman: 'Kid Kosher' Gets A Title Shot

Oct. 29, 2008

Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: GET US THE TAPE THE L.A. TIMES REFUSES TO RELEASE, AND WE'LL GIVE YOU CASH!

Dr. Ari Korenblit: Making The Write Choice for President

Oct. 28, 2008

Mona Charen: Denial runs through American Jewry

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Sell-off to capitalism or sell-out to Islam?

Oct. 27, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Are tax deductions for charitable donations moral?

Jonathan Mark: The Mystery Of The Arab-American Vote

Oct. 24, 2008

'Why aren't all religious people vegetarians?': Response by Miriam Kosman

Caroline B. Glick: Testing Obama's mettle

Oct. 23, 2008

Daniel Pipes: Obama Would Fail Security Clearance

The Kosher Gourmet by Linda Gassenheimer: A fast chicken dish with an Asian accent

Oct. 20, 2008

Gary Rosenblatt: Still One Torah

Jonathan Tobin: Government 'Gifts' Are Not Free

Oct. 17, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Sukkos and the Great Meltdown

Caroline B. Glick: The disappearance of law

Oct. 16, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Copying DVDs: RIP OR RIPOFF?

Cal Thomas: Blaming the Jews (again)

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review August 12, 2005 / 7 Av, 5765

Lost in space

By Rich Lowry


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Now that the Space Shuttle Discovery is back safely, we can breathe a sigh of relief, hail the pluck and bravery of its crew, and ask: How did our space program become so invested in such a clunker?

It's almost as if the shuttle exists so we can throw it into orbit to see if its crew can manage to get it back down again. This is not stuff to fire the imagination. Despite NASA's fluff about the "wild success" of Discovery's flight, at this point about the only people enthusiastic about the shuttle program are aerospace contractors and the pork-barreling congressmen from those states where NASA makes its home. For them, every half-a-billion-dollar space-shuttle launch represents the wonderful majesty of cold, hard cash.

Defenders of the embattled shuttle program say, among other things, that it is needed to support the International Space Station. Alas, it's true. The shuttle basically exists to go to the space station, and the space station exists so the shuttle can have someplace to go. They are mutually reinforcing boondoggles. Together they represent the stunted dreams and the wasteful spending of the space program 36 years after Neil Armstrong took "one small step."

The shuttle has a great future behind it. It was supposed to fly every week — but now is lucky to go a handful of times a year and is grounded again after NASA spent two years and $1 billion failing to figure out how to stop foam from dangerously flaking off the fuel tank. It was supposed to carry satellites into orbit for launching, an impossibly costly way to get satellites into orbit. Now it's creaky, dangerous and nearly purposeless.

Journalist Gregg Easterbrook, a devastatingly convincing scourge of the shuttle program, writes: "The shuttle's main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game."

A Federal Aviation Administration official estimates that if commercial aviation had the same accident rate as the shuttle, more than 500 flights would crash a day. The science projects conducted aboard the shuttle have the musty whiff of make-work. The experiments on the doomed shuttle Columbia included examining "bacterial and yeast cell responses to the stresses of spaceflight" and developing "the gravity-sensing organs of fish in the absence of gravity."

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The spectacularly expensive space station is just as dismal. It was supposed to serve as a jumping-off point for further space exploration and provide a platform for zero-gravity manufacturing.

Nothing doing. Now, one of its main functions is to serve as a symbol of international cooperation. The U.S.-Russia joint work on the station is a nice bookend to the Cold War, which had fueled the space race between the two countries. But how much do you want to pay for your nice bookends? The bottled water that astronauts drink on the space station costs nearly half a million dollars a day, according to Easterbrook's calculation. It has two astronauts on board who are focused on routine maintenance and serve as guinea pigs to test the effects of long-term weightlessness.

The shuttle is slated to be retired by 2010. It can't come too soon. The space program is better focused on getting astronauts to a destination: the moon, Mars, wherever. In the meantime, unmanned probes are the space program's stars. They explore Mars and Saturn, deliver beautiful images of the far reaches of the universe, and shoot projectiles at comets. NASA is nonetheless considering cutting funding for Voyager 1 and the data it's sending back from the edges of the solar system so the space shuttle can be kept limping along.

Time to give the shuttle an honored place in the Smithsonian.

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© 2005 King Features Syndicate

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