stardust

stardust

I just watched the Stardust mission reenter the earth's atmosphere and land in Utah, listening to the commentary and watching NASA TV for the last hour or so. Why is it that whenever NASA has one of these triumphs, that it is always JPL and not NASA as a whole? And it was a triumph for Lockheed Martin, which built the capsule (imagine a parachute that works perfectly seven years after being packed, on a spacecraft that reentered the earth's atmosphere at 48 thousand miles an hour).

I swear, if NASA was reduced to the guys who run the Hubble, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, JPL, and NASA's web presence, and all the rest of NASA was shut down, nobody would be able to tell the difference. Sure, they wouldn't have a manned capability into space, but that's been the case since February 2003 except for a two week period last year anyhow.

Technorati Tags: Space, JPL, NASA