Discovery is scheduled to launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday. Meet the crew(CNN). They've all got balls in my book. Good luck to 'em.
I am glad to see that they are going to fly again. They have bigger ones then I do. I hope that the next gen space craft will debut in the next 5-10 years though.
While I'm strongly in favor of space exploration, the shuttle program has been one gigantic sh!tpile since inception. It was (poorly) designed to service another (sh!tpile) project, the space station, and the space station has been greatly scaled back. Huge cost overruns, technology that should've been retired years ago, limited payload capacity, and expensive launch and payload costs...the lists goes on and on. It's sad to think what NASA could've done with the billions we've wasted on the shuttle. Hope no one gets blown up/incinerated.
Here's a good link to how we got here. http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000Rs&topic_id=1&topic Next time someone puts up a power point that is unintelligible, wonder why that is.