Further on "Space Shuttle Porn: Our Endangered Space Shuttle Glides, As Seen From Space"

I grew up on Long Island where the Grumman Co. built the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM, along with others the 80 F-14s in Iran just before the hostage crisis and almost 4000 of their employees, training the Iranians to fly. They never took delivery on 100. Once the mainstay of our fleet operations) and one friend's father, who started when the company was a small machine shop building for the "Cradle of Aviation" as it has come to be known, said that they had the LEMs built all over the island in small shops so no one ever had the "big picture". Is it engineering design limitations or does the Russian "Buran" (also a Soviet cruise missile: Wikipedia) look like a US Space Shuttle? The Russian lunar lander looked abit like LEM. Go Rutan! Space Shuttle Porn: Our Endangered Space Shuttle Glides, As Seen From Space

When "Space Shuttle Challenger" disintegrated Jan. 28, 1986 I was in Princeton, NJ in a tree nursery digging archaeology test holes in the ground for the then proposed Route 1 interchange. I felt a little similitude as I was wondering what has me and a few others out digging a grid of holes in the winter when warmer weather might be more efficient. Progress! When the first shuttle launched "Columbia" in 1981, I began working on the National Park Service archaeology of the William Floyd Manor, in Old Mastic, NY, he a signer of the "Declaration of Independence" (fourth and/or first New Yorker). When "Columbia" burned up it carried the Israeli pilot/astronaut who had flown in 1981 on the mission to bomb the French-built nuclear powerplant in Iraq suspected of making nuclear weapons. Flying in extreme formation, they flew through international airspace on radar as an errant jetliner. His notebook, which was recovered from the "Columbia" debris in Texas is being preserved and treated. Sometimes, the sooner the better. It took forever to get an educator in space.