"And I do it with the aid and on the backs of preternaturally-gifted Jewish slave labor."

Or in the words of Tom Lehrer: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!' says Wernher von Braun."

You would be surprised what sacrifices are made to protect important secrets, especially in wartime. For example reveals from Project Ultra message decoding in the UK, were often not acted upon, because to do so would reveal a vital code breaking capability, thus allowing the Germans to take corrective measures. Many lives were lost in the short term to protect the long term goal of winning the war. Sadly the morality of an effective leader can differ somewhat from that of an individual civilian.

A shuttle like this these days can't be kept secret at all. Test flights are very easy to spot. The way it works nowadays is we know something exists but not what it can do. They'd have had it up there the second Bartlett heard about the problem.

@@shuttlecrossing1433 The U.S. does have a military version of the shuttle, although scaled down and unmanned.

@@kalospantarkes1861yep, and SpaceX launched it a few months ago on a Falcon Heavy.

He had a foreign dignitary assassinated. Bartlett may be idealistic but he is also pragmatic about the balance between his values and what's good for the country. Especially where it comes to military matters

I agree. It seemed as if Leo knew everything about everything, even sometimes more than Bartlett. So why didn't CJ have access to the same information?

this has been addressed over the course of the show. They purposely keep CJ out of the loop on some information, so that she has plausible deniability when talking with the press. There are some sensitive things that she can't discuss and if she truly doesn't know then she can't accidently let something slip.

@@thekirksiffs5285 This isn't about CJ, Press Secretary. This is about CJ, Chief of Staff. Her clearance certainly went up a few notches when she got promoted.

@@thekirksiffs5285 Yes that applied when she was the press secretary. But by this point she was Chief of Staff, and she no longer talked to the press on a daily basis.

@@thekirksiffs5285 When she was White House spokesperson. She is now Chief of Staff to the President of the United States. Its an entirely different job now... Remember when Josh snickered a bit because he "technically" outranked her.... now she is Leo and she outranks everyone except the president and its her job to gate keep for him, to decide who gets his time, who doesn't, and how much time then advise the president on all his choices.... Technically she should know more than the president so she can properly direct his traffic. Different job.

It's also unbelievable that no one leaked this before - given the number of people who would have to be involved in designing, building, and testing it, someone would have blabbed about a secret military shuttle capable of being launched at a moment's notice.

I think they did it because Schiff wanted out of the show

@@derrickstorm6976 Except that he was still on the show until the final episode.

@@derrickstorm6976 No that's not true, Schiff didn't want to leave, he was very unhappy with the storyline, and felt it wasn't true to his character.

I thought they were going to pull something at the end where Toby reveals he lied to cover for CJ. I thought that was going to be the twist in their conversation at Toby's place. Toby falling on his sword for his friend is absolutely something he would do.

The investigators said that Nasa people suspected of leaking had the technical information off. If they didn't have the right technical info, how did Toby, as we don't see CJ giving Toby loads of details.

They might be aiming for clips to be a certain length. In the last month, all the videos seem to be between 4:30 and 5:15. The Charlie/Zoey scene is about 1:20. It's possible there isn't a secret shuttle scene of comparable length from this episode for them to fit into this video.

Also. A good scene that shows this episode is not just about the leak.

You're not thinking in terms of a tv show.😊

They literally have the character say at 2:43 that the sections can be closed off to conserve air.

At the time this aired in 2004 there were four modules: Destiny, Zarya, Unity and Zvezda. they could have been sealed off for sure. But the space station was much smaller and couldn't accommodate multiple lifeboat craft like it does now. Though there would have been at least one crew capable Soyuz. Depending if there was a Soyuz crew hand over, a second one could have been present.

As someone stated earlier, it’s TV. In reality there are always enough seats on attached spacecraft for everyone on board the ISS. When SpaceX’s current Dragon capsule up at the ISS had to change docking ports for Starliner, it required those 4 astronauts to suit up and board the Dragon capsule even though they wouldn’t be doing anything. Safety measure.

@@christianvalentin5344 This episode is for a scenario 20 years ago. What is possible now was threadbare back then.

Having a Republican Senator from California who was pro-choice who somehow made it thru the Republican Primary didn't really make any sense. Even 20 years ago.

@@elijahcanning3020 Not that far-fetched. The last Republican Senator from California let office in 1992 just 14 years before the final season.

That’s the Secretary of Defense, so I’m guessing he has.

Wasn't this season 6?

@@TIB1973yes it was.

No, dear. It was Toby.

That isn't really how clearances work. Just because you have a clearance doesn't automatically give you access to everything at that clearance level especially at the higher clearance levels. During the Manhattan project the Vice President didn't even know about the project. When Roosevelt died and Truman became president he had no idea about the bomb, he was briefed after he was sworn in as president. CJ isn't the one who decides she has a need to know.

Perhaps the NASA admin was brought into the topic, but normally doesn't have the absolute highest TS clearance. It's not hard to believe that DOD would want fulll access to build their military shuttle Which is why he had access. But he's not used to having to keep that sort of clearance, so let's it slip a tiny bit to CJ. WHat's unbelievable is that CJ wouldn't have full Top Secret clearance, one of the highest in the United States, after being promoted to CoS.

a nasa scientist is a moron?

@@WolfRamAndHart TS is not the highest clearance, and as has been repeatedly said, that doesn't give you free access to anything you want. Highly classified programs are compartmentalized. Only certain people have access to them.

You clearly don’t know what SCI means