One suspects Star Trek fanatic John Hood will appreciate this passage from Joel Stein’s latest TIME column on the end of the American space shuttle era.
Now that we’re stuck on earth, it feels as if we not only stopped trying but stopped caring. U.S. human spaceflight was not supposed to end with a garbage-collecting mission. It was supposed to end with a battle against aliens and a speech making clear that the aliens’ problems were a metaphor for human foibles such as racism and overpopulation, then a bombastic reading of the captain’s log by a man totally unaware of which syllables to stress.
