Glad the shuttle is safely back on the ground even though it had to come to California, instead of Florida. A Florida landing would be cheaper turnaround, but weather had other ideas.
I'm looking forward to pondering more universal questions with the newly refurbished Hubble Telescope.
To get the shuttle back to Florida, they place it on top of a large aircraft and fly it across the nation.
Back when I was in college, they put the shuttle on top of a plane to test it for aerodynamics. This was sometime in the late 1970s. At the time, I was living in a sloppy rooming house full of college students. One of the students ask;
"Why are they flying two planes on top of each other?" "What a waste of energy."
I tried to explain, but her response was sort of like "don't confuse me with the facts." She didn't get it.
"What a waste, two planes on top of each other," she kept saying.
My own lifestyle is austere compared to many Americans, but I still value the ability to contemplate cosmic questions. One nice thing about outer space, we don't all have to go there to learn from it. We can send up a few public telescopes rather than each having to buy our own scope.
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