"We failed to make orbit," Omar Baez, NASA's launch director, said at a news conference. "All indications are that the satellite and the rocket are in the southern Pacific Ocean somewhere."
424 million dollars into the drink, and the best we get is it's in the ocean "somewhere"?
Thankfully, no one knows how big $424,000,000 is anymore--other than it's a lot of money. And since no one trusts science anyway, a little more data on global climate would just get ignored.
But for almost a half billion dollars, seems fair to ask just where the sucker landed. Heck, a $99 GPS can tell you that.
The photo is from World Weblog Whizz.
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3 comments:
Not once it gets wet. Maybe they need to build in an epirb on all these items. But then someone would complain about the expense of a $300 unnecessary piece of equipment, not to mention the extra fuel to launch the extra 200 grams.
Anyway, we're not getting the money back, unless it had comprehensive coverage. I think NASA only purchases collision. With a huge deductible. They have a lot of points on their license.
Dear Anonymous,
Good points, but surely we could hire an intern to plot GPS points every 5 microseconds, then send the Coast Guard on a mission to the last plotted point.
As far as points, I believe NASA used the Texas courts to expunge those Shuttle, um, incidents, using the GW Bush precedent.
I watched a child slowly die as her heart failed. She was not a citizen, and her parents could not afford a transplant, her only shot at survival. This is not apocryphal, her medical records sit in a storage warehouse somewhere.
Maybe someday an archaeologist will unearth those records (good luck, we can barely find archived charts today) and ponder how an advanced civilization could justify shooting metal up into space while its young languished underneath the rocket's red glare.
ANd one more point--I like the idea of EPIRB's on the ships, but their track record here off the coast of Jersey has been shaky.
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