Some men were standing next to an idling vehicle and talking about global warming. I moaned inwardly, and considered the implications of this.

Could it be that these men, who were obviously outwardly concerned about global warming, did not really understand, that their very conversation, taking place next to one of their automobiles while it was idling was actually contributing to the rapid increase of temperature our planet is experiencing?

I know the vehicle belonged to one of them because before the light turned, their friend who had apparently needed some refreshment came out of the convenience store and they got in and drove off.

It is simple people, if, and this is a big if, we are going to be able to stave off this impending crisis, we need to start years ago, but now would not hurt either, turn off your car whenever you can, or even better, choose to walk.

Those words placed the United States firmly n the first place in the space race, and that is a place that we have held, precariously ever since.

But, the next era of American manned spaceflight was to start nearly a decade after the final flight of the Apollo manned lunar missions, on December 19, 1972 America concluded its bold human exploration and began nearly a decade of design and construction of our “red herring” space craft the Space Shuttle. During this time no more Americans in would ride into space on American built spacecraft on missions of exploration.

The space shuttle came on the scene with much fanfare, and quickly turned out to not live up to the promises of NASA or the designers. From the first flight on, it proved to be quit high maintenance, very robust, and capable, but much more expensive and time consuming than originally promised.

We started flying again, and visiting our former competitors, the Russians, in their highly successful space station Mir. The space shuttle wound up not being the cheap satellite launch vehicle it was intended to be, but it still was able to complete some otherwise impossible repairs, but it’s orbit was much lower than anticipated so we wound up going to other launch vehicles for the majority of lifts into space. We had a truck….but nothing really to haul. So, let’s justify the existence by challenging the world to come together to build a shiny new space station.

The plan worked, and kept the shuttle flying…long after it should have been mothballed, as a matter of fact, there are other methods that would have been far more cost effective for the construction of the ISS. Which, the news now claims is to be de-orbited in 7 years, we just finished construction. To me that is a waste of the billions and billions of dollars used to get it up there, the reason, it is economically impractical to keep it aloft.

I watch the news, pay attention to the weather, I can sense the world gasping for air. We are on a downhill spiral, and need to be considering ways to either save our planet, or survive the soon to come dramatic changes. They are coming, I know you can feel it, it is too late to make a positive improvement before the world goes through it’s flushing cycle, the last major extinction event wiped out the dinosaurs, and while we are more hardy…our race will be devastated to say the least.

Let’s not let it sneak up on us, and look back and go, oh man, I knew this was going to happen. Let us be prepared, give NASA the money to do what it needs to do.

Wow, dunno where that came from, pent up I guess. Don’t ignore it, look around you, watch the weather patterns, it will become evident.