On the excrescent folly that is the Space Shuttle

A great line from the New York Post today in re the Space Shuttle: "The Space Shuttle is a barely operational portable toilet strapped to several million pounds of high explosives."

Long before the Challenger disaster, persons of intelligence who were not blinded by bureaucratic partisanship, were complaining about the complete folly, in every respect, of the Space Shuttle. Even by the standards of insanity that tend to prevail whenever bureaucrats are shielded from responsibility for their folly by the government's powers of coercive taxation, the Space Shuttle was an egregious piece of stupidity that should have ended the careers of every person who endorsed it. In fact, way back in 1980, the prescient Gregg Easterbrook penned this all-too-on-target piece called "Beam Me Out of This Death Trap, Scotty!" -- a piece that not only outlined the obscene and utterly unacceptable level of risk involved in the engineering of the shuttle, but also exposed the Enronesque accounting dishonesties perpetrated by the NASA bureaucrats in their attempts to perpetuate their agency funding. I repeat that this article was published a year before Columbia's first flight.