We're driving up to watch the launch. I hadn't thought I was going to be in Florida this week, so I didn't bother to try to get a base pass, so we'll probably just watch from across the river in Titusville. No blogging--I don't have Verizon wireless, and doubt if I'll find a connection up there.

At 1:42 the astronauts are disembarking the orbiter. NASA must have delayed the launch.

Faulty tank sensor, no new date set.

Cripes. Mothball the fleet and get it over with already. Put the money towards something useful (or, less useless).

The earliest date at which it will launch is now July 18th.

The tank strikes again; large, expensive and deadly is no way to go through design life kid.

An opinion on space:

Turn NASA into a regulatory and pure science body and give gigantic tax breaks to any company that can create affordable, safe, commercially viable spaceflight and get the government out of the spaceflight monopoly business.

There are asteroids floating around out there with enough important minerals and metals to keep us fixed for structural materials for a long damn time. There's a big, fat moon just 3 days away (at slow speed) that's ripe for off-planet manufacturing and hazardous product generation. There's no reason the government should be worrying itself with developing those resources when stuff on-planet needs fixin'.

Now, I'm a huge fan of getting the hell off this planet, but I'd rather see LMCO do a Hudson Bay Company than watch another 30 years of wasted efforts (due respect to dedicated NASA staff and employees).

Liberals: They aren't what you think. . .

Courtesy DailyKos:

http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2005/7/13/19815/1575/6#6

Yep, liberals are like broken clocks: Right twice a day, wrong the other one thousand four hundred and thirty eight times.

Fair enough, Mike. ;-)

But in the drive to privatize space, don't you want as many allies as possible?

There were a few KOS threads today on the scrubbed shuttle launch and even I was surprised by the number of comments which strongly favor private sector spaceflight. And while folks wished Shuttle Discovery "GodSpeed" - - NO ONE seemed to think the orbiter was worth keeping around much longer, if at all.

Which is good because Keith Cowing is reporting Mike Griffin wants to retire Discovery in 2007 and retire Atlantis in 2009.

Boo-rah! :-)

Im not sure just how problems on an aged launch system have turned into yet another liberal vs. conservative shoot-out..... but I tend to think fervent followers of EITHER party should consider seeing one of those 'cult de-programmers' that were popular in the '70's.

There's no reason the government should be worrying itself with developing those resources when stuff on-planet needs fixin'.

"There are asteroids floating around out there with enough important minerals and metals to keep us fixed for structural materials for a long damn time."

We aren't exactly running short of iron here on planet earth. We have junkyards full of the stuff. It's a matter of applying the right processes and enough energy to turn it back into usable form. I think the amount of energy required would be much smaller than the amount needed for an asteroid mining expedition to obtain the same amount of material.

And given that you need a spacesuit or a fully enclosed and recycled environment on the moon; and that astronauts have enough trouble standing up in a spacesuit, never mind performing complex and strenuous tasks; and that we don't know how to fully recycle essential elements of life support so as to have that enclosed environment; I don't see how we're going to either conduct mining operations or hazardous material generation on the moon, or whether it is even worth the trouble to do so.

As things stand now, it looks like the shuttle exists to build the space station, and the space station exists to give the shuttle something to do. There are cheaper ways of doing nothing. NASA has turned this long-time human spaceflight supporter into one of the "shut it down" crowd, I'm sorry to say. Let's work on the technology down here and turn back to space when we can do it a lot better than we can now.

Meanwhile, put more money into more and better planetary probes and telescopes, and booster rockets so project scientists don't have to spend their entire careers waiting for their spacecraft to reach it's destination while it gets gravity assists from every planet in the inner solar system.