Word: stationed
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Amount Dennis Rodman stiffed a gas station on a cross-country road race for charity...
...being a teenager is not all bad. I'm old enough to see a PG-13 movie without a parent, I am able to go places with my friends, I can constantly call my favorite radio station, K-Earth, and request that they play Kokomo, and I finally get to move on to high school...
...tough questions that have gone unasked about the space shuttle have also gone unasked about the space station, which generates billions in budget allocations for California, Texas, Ohio, Florida and other states. Started in 1984 and originally slated to cost $14 billion in today's dollars, the space station has already cost at least $35 billion--not counting billions more for launch costs--and won't be finished until 2008. The bottled water alone that crews use aboard the space station costs taxpayers almost half a million dollars a day. (No, that is not a misprint.) There are no scientific...
That didn't stop people from wondering whether a space walk still might have been wise, since if the crew could somehow have determined that the tiles were compromised, they might at least have hightailed it to the International Space Station--which the shuttles routinely visit anyway--and awaited a lift home aboard another shuttle or a Russian vehicle. But that possibility was foreclosed, since crews must rigorously train for a space-station docking and must carry aboard an adapter collar to make the linkup possible. Neither of those conditions was met on Columbia...
Whether we will is impossible to know. The space station has long been a fiscal black hole, and with the eventual cost of the massive outpost projected to top $100 billion, NASA is not likely to abandon it without a mighty fight. The three crewmen currently on board--two Americans and a Russian--have a Soyuz re-entry vehicle aboard, and both the U.S. and Russia have the wherewithal to go fetch them if that should fail. But once they're gone, will anyone be back? The space station can't operate without the shuttle to service it, and with...