Five stars for a courageous man who was a victim of our totally wasteful and unnecessary manned space program. Grissom and his collegues who were killed in the capsule fire, and those who perished in the two space shuttle disasters all died needlessly, as the benefits that have been derived from NASA's reckless risk-taking with people's lives over the years are spurious, at best. Essentially, the only practical application of space exploration with any merit has been telecommunications and weather satellites, neither of which require humans to leave the planet. The moon shots were very expensive wastes of time and effort that, in the final analysis, contributed very little to our scientific knowledge, and the advances in our lunar understanding were hardly worth the cost. The shuttle program, an ill-advised and truly unneeded fiasco from the start, has been very costly, well beyond original estimates, grossly underutilized, has really only yielded scientific findings pertinent to space travel, and in essence, this development of billions of dollars worth of hardware and systems has only one mission: to service the unnecessary space station, which is another very expensive waste that should be mothballed. In addition, the shuttle is totally obsolete as its technology is about 30 years old, and the entire fleet should be retired before another tragedy occurs. It was in the news today that the Columbia catastrophe was, to a significant degree, a result of poor management and flawed procedures on the part of NASA, so material failure on an aging craft, it turns out, was not the sole cause of those people perishing in vain. As NASA was pretty much outlived its usefulness, the entire agency should be cut back dramatically and manned flights should be scrapped. But considering that NASA is a core element of the cowboy mentality that has compromised the forward progress of America, and keeping in mind that many U.S. corporations have been very well compensated by this governmental teat, the moronoic yahoos who feel putting human beings at ultimate risk for the sake of dubious scientific advancements and those private-sector entitites who stand to lose $$$ if this needless and wasteful gravy train rumbles to a halt aren't going to give up without a fight. And once again, the taxpayers are the ones who are going to subsidize this nonsense if they prevail. It's tragic that Grissom and others have died for no good reason, and we as Americans owe it to their memories to totally reconfigure NASA's mission.

I think ol' Gus did allright