July 8, 2025
George Giles wrote:
The space shuttle was a horrific disaster. While sucking up hundreds of billions of tax dollars it failed in every single specification that was its justification for existence. The shuttle’s ancillary behavior was all the astronauts it killed. The Soviet launch system has proven vastly safer and lower cost. Think about that.
Libertarian critic Doug Bandow said of the shuttle almost thirty tears ago “you would be hard pressed to find a more expensive way to put payload in orbit.”
Congress told NASA after the Challenger exploded to resurrect the Saturn V a bargain at only $10 million each. NASA replied that they cannot since the tooling and plans were gone. This was not an accident.
Nonetheless the space shuttle continues to punish the taxpayer. Trump’s One Bloated Horrific bill has $85 million buried in it to ship a shuttle from DC to Texas where it will be monument to fraud, waste and abuse. Still the taxpayer burden for this ‘icon’ will not end with delivery, but will be a continuing resolution where if outdoors will have to be maintained against the corrosive effects of sun and weather. If indoors it will require a large space requiring heat in winter and air conditioning in the nine month summer near Houston.
Surely President Trump as a conservative must have been drowsy when reading the 1100+ page bill as he would have removed this particular item as nonsensical.
