A way to smile at the shuttle

Now that it's down on the ground, we can safely chuckle at the jokes about the space shuttle mission that wrapped up a couple of landings late and at least one launch attempt short. Out at the Andy Borowitz Web site, his shocker of today included this wrap-up "in other news" joke, the one-liner that's often funnier than the fake news story;

Elsewhere, NASA pronounced the just-completed space shuttle mission a success, saying that the Discovery astronauts had made important scientific discoveries about foam debris, missing tiles and weather delays.

It's easy to see that some of the rust is showing on the 25-year-old shuttle design. It's taken its toll on the sheen of the program, that devil-may-care swagger we expect since the days when Clark Gable wowed moviegoers in Test Pilot. The NY Times reported that the astronaut commander on Discovery didn't have much of a sense of humor about shifting the landing site yesterday:

Mission Control: "How do you feel about a beautiful, clear night with a breeze down the runway in the high desert of California?"

Commander Colonel Collins: "We are ready for whatever we need to do."

In years past, when I was a boy, the commander might have replied with a little quip in return. But when your last seven colleagues burned up on re-entry, the jokes come a little harder. NASA is already starting to trot out pictures of replacement designs for the shuttle; we sat in the briefing dome at the Kennedy Space Center on our trip last month and saw drawings that evoked the George Pal-style of spaceship, instead of a jet strapped on the back of the Saturn V.

But it's that Saturn V rocket that sat at the heart of my quest to see a launch in person. Smaller launch rockets go up on a regular schedule. The Atlas V is lifting an unmanned Mars explorer tomorrow, if NASA stays on schedule. If I read the musings of the rocket-heads right, the Atlas has less ability to rattle your chest when it rises off the pad, something pretty important to me. I will be further away from the pad when I see my first launch.