[ExI] Yuri's night.

[John Clark]

On Apr 11, 2010, at spike wrote:
>> 
> A lot of us remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the
> shuttle made it's first flight.  In my case, I was far more worried about
> and emotionally involved in the first re-entry, which was far more risky and
> scary than the first shuttle launch.  So I have two indelible 29 year old
> memories regarding those events.
> Am I the only one here?  Did that rock your world back then?

Yea Spike back then I was young and stupid and pretty excited about the shuttle too, I vividly remember watching both the first launch and the first reentry on TV and thinking, erroneously as it turned out, that I had just witnessed something important.

The Shuttle  was supposed to make spaceflight cheap, routine, and ubiquitous; even the very name "shuttle" suggested that. At the time it all seemed to make sense, it was reusable after all; I remember people saying imagine how expensive it would be to fly across the Atlantic if you had to scrap a 747 every time it flew and then build a new one. I fell for that line completely. However it soon became obvious that the cheap 2 week turnaround promised was total mythology, however I didn't realize just how huge the White Elephant really was until the first shuttle disaster in 1986. The Shuttle was the worst thing that ever happened to spaceflight, we would have done better sticking with the Saturn 5, not one of them ever failed. 

 John K Clark   
> 

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