Poor NASA. They never get any play until they blow something up. Last week they did it again. On Friday safety officials said a suborbital rocket had to be destroyed because it deviated from its flight path.
There were a couple of experiments on board that will have to wait for another day. NASA said:
The Alliant Techsystems rocket was carrying two NASA hypersonic experiments. The Hypersonic Boundary Layer Transition experiment was designed to gather data on air flow conditions and heating on vehicles flying at hypersonic speeds. The Sub-Orbital Aerodynamic Re-entry Experiment was designed to evaluate a possible shape for a space capsule that could travel to Mars and gather data on atmospheric conditions encountered by the reentering probes.
OK, things happen. Stuff explodes. Who doesn’t enjoy a good explosion? Young children across the land all agree: blowing stuff up is (almost) always better than experimenting on things, and you know… uh, stuff.
Just so there are no hard feelings, NASA, here is a list of some cool things you done did:
• Explorer 1, the First U.S. Satellite (1958)
• Hubble Space Telescope, the Universe Unveiled (1990-present)
• Chandra X-ray Observatory, the High-energy Universe (1999- present)
• Pioneer 10, Flight to Jupiter (1972-1997)
• Apollo 13, Brilliance at Mission Control (1970)
• Space Shuttle, a Reusable Spacecraft (1972-present)
• International Space Station, Living in Space (1998-present)
• Mars Pathfinder, Robot on the Red Planet (1996-1997)
• Freedom 7, the First American in Space (1961)
• Apollo 11, a Walk on the Moon (1969)
Not to mention the Voyager missions, which are still going strong.
And the who-knows-how-many-dollars NASA products and research have given back to the economy. It seems to be one of the few government institutions that is very good at doing what it does.