Charles Krauthammer goes to bat for them. I do think that this story is overblown, but he overstates the “spam in a can” argument. Like airline pilots, Shuttle pilots need to have a clear head at launch, in the event of an abort. As for the rest of the crew, it probably wouldn’t hurt much if they were mildly intoxicated, but the notion that one has to have a couple stiff ones to climb into the Shuttle (or the Soyuz) seems a little silly to me, regardless of how many times the joke is repeated, and he seems to be serious about it. Maybe some of the pilots in the Battle of Britain wouldn’t have been able to pass a breathalyzer test, but if so, their chances of killing the enemy, or getting home, would have been sharply reduced compared to their sober colleagues.

And he has entirely much too much faith in NASA to execute the vision, even if it gets support from the politicians.

…is being hosted over at Universe Today.

Well, actually a pre-dawn launch, but it should still be a nice sight if/when the Delta II takes off with the Mars Phoenix lander tomorrow morning, from the Cape. I don’t know if I can work up the gumption to drive up there for it, though. Particularly if we plan to see Endeavour launch on Tuesday, which seems to be back on track with the valve replacement in the crew cabin.

Jeff Foust has found the most egregiously awful reporting of the Scaled Composites explosion yet.

Amidst huge entitlement programs, paying farmers not to grow food, pork and boondoggles, the nation’s transportation infrastructure has been badly neglected, and is quite brittle. It also makes one wonder how many other ticking time bombs there are out there.

This applies to space transportation as well. A category three hurricane could wipe out NASA’s manned space program. On some days, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing. It would force them to do something different, and break us out of the rut we’ve been in since Apollo.

Of course, there’s a big difference. The highway infrastructure was a huge improvement over the past, offering affordable mobility to hundreds of millions of Americans, with a great deal of redundancy and resiliency. The space transportation infrastructure has never been affordable to anyone but the government, or able to support more than a few dozen people in orbit per year, and it’s always been quite fragile, with no backups. Until we address this issue, we’ll never be a spacefaring nation, or accomplish the things there that many of use want. But all that NASA offers is more of the same.