Joe Pursch: Astronauts Prepare for Return to Earth

Sunday, August 07, 2005

As we look to Discovery's prayerfully uneventful recovery, let's also ask for an honest recovery of common sense in regard to the shuttle's future...

SPACE CENTER, Houston — Astronauts completed flight control checks aboard space shuttle Discovery (search) and practiced landing on a computer simulator as they made final preparations Sunday for their return to Earth.

Flight director LeRoy Cain (search) said the weather forecast looked good for Monday's predawn landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Cain said he and everyone else on the entry team at Mission Control (search) were both excited and anxious about Discovery's return, and were not dwelling on Columbia's catastrophic descent 2 1/2 years ago.Earlier Sunday morning, Discovery commander Eileen Collins observed: "It's time to come home and keep working on getting the shuttle better and ready to fly in the future again.

"The important point here is, we shouldn't be "anxious" about the simple recovery of a working spacecraft. Unless, of course, that spacecraft is no longer reliably working. That, sadly, is what we have reached in this enterprise. It will cost more money and lives to get this old technology "better and ready to fly" than it would to design a new platform, precisely because obselesence is a never ending cost. "Good money after bad" is an old maxim. I hope we don't add a new one: "Precious lives after a broken vision".

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