Dr. Strangelovey

A few years back I worked with a Mr. Richter of Staten Island, NY who left "contract archaeology" for Naval Intelligence. What seemed like a short time later, in the first months of the Dubya redux, he was crash landing on Hainan Island in China after colliding with a Chinese jet interceptor. Shortly after that the Bush admin cancelled the "life boat" project for the International Space Station, and called for a return to the Moon, please supply comments, it requested. The destruction of the Columbia orbiter, under Captain Husband (one of the crew was one of the number of Israeli pilots who flew in a close formation of jets, to look like an airliner on radar over interceding countries, in the bombing of the French built nuclear power plant in Irag many years ago) over Texas must have been hard to bear. Many years ago the citizenry of the US wrested the space shuttles away from the US Air Force (to be launched from Vandenberg, CA secretly) to create a peaceful use of space, threatened once again by US military designs, and always newsworthy, perhaps as an "us vs. them" the largest day care center in the world vs. the public sector (just kidding).