I’m a bit disappointed.
The Orion spaceship—our first designed for humans since our space shuttles were retired—was launched on December 5, carried out its test mission and returned successfully the next day. Did anyone notice?
It didn’t seem so. I was excited, but nobody else seemed to care. I haven’t seen it mentioned in the aviation forum I frequent. Our newspaper gave a small, rather dry, report on an inside page, and that’s about it.
I expected to read, see and hear all about the Orion flight in all of the national media. In actuality, it was ignored to an amazing extent.
Hey—we’re back in space with our own machinery after years of depending on the Russians to ferry us back and forth to the International Space Station (ISS), like a kid being run back and forth by his parents. Now, with Putin acting like a bad little boy, we’re no longer comfortable being dependent on them.
Frankly, our reaction time was pretty quick. ZAP! We’re back in space. That seems worthy of more notice to me.
