If it isn't something, it's always something else...

You know how you don't remember everything from your childhood. One of the things I don't remember is what led up to it, but one day my dad packed up me and my brother and drove us to the middle of nowhere. Somewhere in the desert, we pulled into roped off a dirt area filled with all kinds of crazies who came in everything from dirt bikes to mobile homes. We were there all morning, just hanging out and bored stupid - then all of a sudden helicopters are flying back and forth about 10 feet in the air with big machine guns pointed at us. We knew this was the real thing - we had come to see the shuttle land.

Two booms... everyone straining to the sky... someone saw if first... a few "there it is"... then silence... it didn't quite fly, more like it fell out of the sky at a horizontal angle... Three huge parachutes appear from the rear end and then we hear the sounds of a space ship hitting the planet... it turns left and rolls out of view... and just like that, it was over.

Dad had to see it and knew it was something we needed to see as well. It was truly awesome.

Mom had a specific skill with computers and spent a lot of time working for Aerospace companies, Rockwell, Northrop, and Hughes were some that I remember. One time we went to an open house at one of them and got to walk inside one of the booster rockets for the shuttle. The thing was huge. If you wonder why stuff for the space program costs so much it comes down to one word - big. Everything was huge.

So, what was promising to be a lousy Saturday due to a hangover, trip to the dump, the cleaners, and grocery store took a hard left from lousy to downright shitty.

I'm one of those guys who is always bitching and moaning about how the government misspends the small fortune they take in taxes. I'm also one of the Americans who take an inordinate amount of pride in the space program. Even when we are running in the red, as a country, we have decided that it's worth it to spend the resources to push the envelope. Today, we pay a more real price. When the shuttle disintegrated over three states this morning, we lost the lives of seven excellent people. We also were reminded that pursuit of our Manifest Destiny has always come at a hefty price.