{"id":191260,"date":"2009-09-09T07:19:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-09T12:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/09\/09\/and-then-my-head-exploded\/"},"modified":"2009-09-09T07:19:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-09T12:19:00","slug":"and-then-my-head-exploded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/09\/09\/and-then-my-head-exploded\/","title":{"rendered":"And Then My Head Exploded"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/img4.imageshack.us\/img4\/5156\/57da5976bc033a7ac795e40.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/img4.imageshack.us\/img4\/5156\/57da5976bc033a7ac795e40.png\" style=\"margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;\" width=\"400\" \/><\/a>So, I&#8217;m getting Charlie up for school, and he wants to talk about NASA&#8217;s decision make its new Orion crew capsule reusable.<\/p>\n<p>I told him that it really did not make a whole bunch of sense:  It&#8217;s a minuscule part of the cost of a launch, but if it were not reusable, it would be a very public admission by NASA that the entire shuttle program was a failure, and that they were unwilling to do this as an organization.<\/p>\n<p>He asked why this would be a problem, since everyone else saw that this was a true, so their admission would not materially effect their budget (not an exact quote, but the gist is the same. He turns 10 tomorrow, which means that yes, he is <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2007\/05\/i-have-some-scary-kids.html\">scary smart<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>I explained that, like many stupid decisions, this was driven by pride:  NASA was unwilling to admit that the Shuttle was a failure because this conflicted with their self image.<\/p>\n<p>They think that they are Captain Kirk.<\/p>\n<p>His reply:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p><span style=\"font-size:180%;\">Who is Captain Kirk?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Excuse me, while I scrape bits of my skull off the ceiling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, I&#8217;m getting Charlie up for school, and he wants to talk about NASA&#8217;s decision make its new Orion crew capsule reusable. I told him that it really did not make a whole bunch of sense: It&#8217;s a minuscule part of the cost of a launch, but if it were not reusable, it would be &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1092,976,1036,1171],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-family","category-nasa","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}