NASA Clears Space Shuttle for July 1 Launch

We're still at least a couple of millennia from warp-speed trips to the stars, bit for the first time in almost a year, NASA will launch a space shuttle mission on July 1. Barring any of a countless and ever-expanding number of pre-flight complications, Space Shuttle Discovery and a crew of six will lurch aloft at 3:48 p.m. EDT on mission STS-121 to taxi supplies and replacement astronauts to the International Space Station.

For a NASA, plagued by internal finger pointing since the Columbia tragedy in 2003 and Discovery's close call last summer, assuring the public that the space shuttle can and will fly without disaster has become the prime directive. "We had two full days of an intensive Flight Readiness Review," said Administrator Michael Griffin in a NASA press release. "It was spirited and one of the most open, yet non-adversarial meetings I've seen since returning to NASA." Must be comforting to the Discovery crew to know that the bureaucrats who are about to send them into space have become less "adversarial."

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