RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. It is an almost unremarked disaster.
In his State of the Union address, Obama mentioned Sputnik, but not Challenger. He only briefly mentioned NASA, the agency that he effectively dismantled and turned into a global warming alarmist press release mill and Muslim pandering laboratory.

But the story of Challenger is also the story of how one of America’s greatest achievements was watered down and turned into another grant factory. The Space Shuttle program was always a white elephant. It had no real point, except to run research missions. It had no goal. And now even it is dead and Obama has killed its replacement vehicle.

Probably one of the saddest moments has to be NASA’s commemoration of Challenger.

NASA on Friday said “fear of failure” should not hold back its mission to test the boundaries of human space exploration, as the agency marked the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster…

“We who remain on the ground and asked them to fly failed them that day, as we would fail the crew of Columbia 17 years later and as we failed the crew of Apollo 1 19 years before,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, who now oversees NASA’s human space flight programs.

“We can’t let the fear of failure stop us,” he said. “The team has learned tremendous lessons from these events,” Gerstenmaier told a crowd of about 250 gathered at Kennedy Space Center’s Space Mirror Memorial.

But it’s not fear of failure that’s holding us back, but fear of American exceptionalism.

NASA’s human space exploration is now a relic of history, like Apollo. The only way NASA personnel can get to space is by hitching a ride on Russian space vehicles. Just like the billionaires who pay the Russians 20 million for a ride each.

There’s nothing bittersweet about this. Just bitter. We did not meet the challenge of challenger. Or the challenge of America. We elected Obama to rule over us and give us a nanny state instead.