Quite right. But I outgrew it.

Imagine what you wish, but given our sources, this was not a “before the fact scoop”. Rather it included a last minute snapshot as portayed by actual participants in the process just before the last numbers and working were agreed to.

That’s how “scoops” actually work.

As for narcissism – gosh, why not. I seem to recall a lot of self promotion waaaaaaaaay back in the 80’s on your part. You are always free to just ignore me, of course.

Keith Cowing’s breath-taking self centered (one is tempted to say narcissistic) response to Dwayne Day’s article is exceeded only by Mr. Day’s restraint in rebutting Cowing’s assertion’s of –what? That the original UPI wire story in advance of the President’s announcement had some errors?

Ignoring that before-the-fact scoops are inherently prone to such lapses, Mr. Cowing seems to intentionally miss the larger point: That Dwayne’s article was not about Cowing or his UPI article. It was instead about the propagation in the media of a false budget figure for the President’s space initiative.

Instead of carping about interpretations of how Day’s story reflected (indirectly) on his story, Cowing should just be happy to have been mentioned at all.

You would think, anyway.

Ignoring that before-the-fact scoops are inherently prone to such lapses, Mr. Cowing seems to intentionally miss the larger point: That Dwayne’s article was not about Cowing or his UPI article. It was instead about the propagation in the media at large of a false budget figure for the President’s space initiative.

Instead of carping about interpretations of how Day’s story reflected (indirectly) on his story, Cowing should just be happy to have been mentioned at all.

You would think, anyway.

The amount of money it takes to be completely assured of a safe shuttle mission is somewhere less than infinity and greater than the current budget (evidently).

It’s just a thought, but I wonder if NASA has considered adapting the shuttle for unmanned launch of the remaining ISS components. The astronauts would launch on Soyuz until CEV was available, and rendezvous in the proximity of ISS to fine maneuver the shuttle into position and perform the on-orbit assembly. To land the shuttle, they would only need to risk one person – that’s it – the rest would return by Soyuz/CEV.

This way, only the orbiter needs to be man-rated, and it can be inspected on-orbit using Soyuz/CEV before re-entry. For the same level of risk, the ground-handling would become more affordable, and perhaps the flight rate would go up sufficiently to finish ISS before re-certification. You’d expect to lose one or two more shuttles before ISS is complete, but nobody would be on board, and there would be no need to waste money on the Shuttle-C.

I see two drawbacks with this approach: One is that (if I remember correctly) the early ISS modules will still be in need of replacement by the time ISS is complete. The other is that launching payloads on the Shuttle and personnel on Soyuz could be highly embarrassing to NASA. It would be an interesting and perhaps cruel test of “new NASA” to see if they could put cost and mission success ahead of institutional humiliation. In any case, stage management of such things appears to be a fine art these days, so perhaps it’s a non-issue after all.

Many of us hoi polloi space advocates are not real happy about spending billions per year on the orbiter when there may be a good chance we will end up not finishing ISS anyway.

My opinion (if you care) is that we either finish ISS with shuttle derived and then include that technology as an intregal part of Project Constellation =OR= we walk away from the STS/ISS debacle right now. Orbiter NEVER flies again and we invest all the STS/ISS money in Constellation beginning today.

You want to focus on the subset of all that the article said which was not 100% right – not the totality of what it contained. I am clearly not going to sway you form that going in assumption.

Ciao