This is when watching the news actually made you smarter.

Amen!

Peggy Noonan*

not any more.

Many of us still want for those days to come back.

Well it wasn’t black smoke

9/11 was really the last time where you had the big 3 anchors providing that sense of stability as best as they could. But it clearly took a toll on them. Peter Jennings took up smoking which cost him his life 4 years later. Dan Rather broke down twice on his appearance on David Letterman the following week. Tom Brokaw didn’t have any sort of public breakdown but I seem to recall reading that he broke down in private after he left the anchor chair that first day.

Pride and managerial ineptitude - yes, greed? No. NASA is not a for-profit organization

what use does it do? is anyone ever going to live on the moon or Mars? no

teresa linton how does your cell phone work?

don't forget the Columbia too

The Challenger explosion was there to remind us that we are a brave civilization & wanted to learn new things.

+epaddon He was on a mid-90's Discovery Channel documentary on the Shuttle program basically saying the same thing, as I recall. By then, it was clear that his viewpoint was right and this wasn't going to live up to its initial expectations. Here's the link to (at least) the first episode of that. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/j555ZJmeltCud3U.html

Manned spaceflight is a funny thing. It's like a nuclear program, except colossally harder and more expensive. The fragile human crew is like eggshells vs. a nice sturdy bomb that can take 100g and doesn't need oxygen or warmth. Plus, you gotta haul the payload BACK to where it started from, intact, at the end of the flight. A single fully-functional nuclear device has somewhere around 26,500 discrete parts (so 50-60x more than your car). The Space Shuttle launch vehicle had 2.5 million parts, of which 1.1 million were considered "critical", as in their failure would probably destroy or cripple the vehicle (depending on when it occurred and to what degree). The Shuttle was vastly more technically complicated than Apollo but nobody saw them as "exploring" anything new with the Shuttle so it never had the brainpower, funding, public interest, legislative support or institutional morale that the moon missions did. Full stop. A program that ends with a 1 in 3 catastrophic failure rate for the airframes is not a good program. The "Failure is not an option" days at NASA were definitely over by then.

@@YorkVid still these uploads are great please keep uploading

The gains that humanity made due to manned space flight is incalculable. Any unmanned exploration stands on the shoulders of the astronauts.

I don’t think his point was that solid in 1986 though a much better point today in 2023

Ray Gordon Teaches Chess No, the crew compartment hit at a speed of more than 250 mph, far beyond the limits of structural or human survivability.

Survived the impact? dafuq?

He wasn't one either.

America thrived on the economy that Reagan created for nearly 3 DECADES. He also brought us out of the dark days of the 70's. How old are you?

@@Random_Number Just wait for kanye 2020

@@Random_Number It's telling that your only metric for a great president is economic. You maybe missed Iran-Contra.

@@BartAlder Very assumptive. Reagan brought this country out of, as Carter famously said, the "malaise" of the 70's. He more or less single-handedly saved America from the very dark fate we were headed toward. He did that not only economically, but also by reviving the country's morale. The 80's and 90's would have been MUCH different decades if not for Reagan. As to your beef, whether Iran-Contra can be laid at the feet of Reagan is highly debatable. And ultimately, it's no different than what John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Obama did in terms of supplying weapons to terrorists (research Benghazi if you don't understand why) -- the only difference is that Reagan didn't sacrifice any Americans to cover his own ass, the way Clinton et al did.

What an "original' comment. Jerkoff...

I laughed too. It's like something Kent Brockman would say.

It's obvious that you were either very young or not even thought of due to your statements. You need to know your facts.

@@BrandiHilton-pq2km sounds like you are confused.

@@BrandiHilton-pq2km sounds like you are confused.

@@JohnJohn-zn8ib Confused about what? The Challenger Accident? Nope- I am not. We were young pre teens when the shuttle exploded. All 7 of them passed away. Apparently you weren't alive or even thought of yet when it exploded. 7 astronauts braved going into space to explore.