Columbia Lost.

[DarkHawke]

By sheer chance I had the tube on just as they were showing the re-entry of the shuttle wreckage over Texas.  You hope against hope, but you know anyway.   :-(   I hope that, as we mourn this loss and find and correct whatever went wrong (if possible), we realize that these astronauts wouldn't want this to stop the space program.  To truly honor their memory, we must go on.  The President has already said as much, and I hope that is the case.  Thankfully we have the added inertia of the space station, but I know that many will start pissing and moaning about how much we "waste" on the space program just because we've lost 14 astronauts in 17 years.  Maybe if the budget didn't get cut year after year, we'd be working with something better than 1970s technology to go to and from orbit.

[DarkHawke]

They use old technology on purpose, firstly everything has to be qualified for space (radiation resistance etc.) and they only use things which are tried and tested. Using the latest tech would be a very risky move. Consequently you'll probably still find things like 68000 CPUs in the Shuttle.

Regrettably, this isn't the case.  If the space program had continued as planned (i.e. with something MUCH closer to the original budget request) after the Apollo program, a far more effective shuttle program would have begun in the mid-'70s and not the early '80s.  The 68000 series was produced well after the shuttle program began.   They actually use something closer to Apple II tech (6502) or the old Z80s.  The only 680x0 computers I know of in use by NASA are the Amigas still being used to handle flight data telemetry (odd how things are related, eh?).

Yes, they do perform extensive testing of the kind you're talking about, but given better budgets, the testing would occur that much quicker and design specs would not have to be scaled back so much.  For instance, did you know that as originally conceived, the shuttle would have had a manned and completely reusable booster that would have glided back to the ground much as the shuttle does?  Not that this particular difference would have prevented this tragedy, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's discovered that had some budget-enforced design compromise not been made, the risks of shuttle re-entry could have been greatly minimized.