The Final Countdown?

You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief when Discovery's troubled mission came to a happy end Tuesday morning with a textbook touchdown at Edwards AFB. Thus ended a mission in which nearly all the attention was focused on maintaining the mission, leaving open the question of what was gained other than launching the shuttle and retrieving it. Oh, yes. We also resupplied the equally questionable International Space Station.
The shuttles are grounded indefinitely while the rocket scientists at NASA (that sounds sarcastic even though it isn't) try to figure out why foam insulation keeps flying off the fuel tanks. Either this never happened before or people just didn't take it seriously before the Columbia disaster. That leaves open the question of whether these vehicles will ever be launched again. NASA is already talking about launching capsules into space again like in the 60s, the ultimate case of going back to the future.
I must admit that this morning I sat glued to the TV with my kids watching that glowing dot in the California sky morph into the shape of a shuttle and touch down so gracefully on the tarmac, coming from quadruple the speed of sound to a dead stop in a matter of minutes. All day today I was filled with awe. I guess it takes a catastrophe like Columbia to refocus us on what an incredible feat it is to safely launch people off the planet and then recover them safely, no worse for the wear. Over the years it had become so routine.
Nevertheless, the thrills in this case are too expensive. As I wrote below, this should be the final countdown. The risk of lost life and the billions of dollars wasted are too much to justify when there is no discernable benefit to those of us on the ground but to fire up our imagination and deceive us with the notion that we could one day travel far beyond our planet. It's impossible and the sooner we get a reality check on this the better off we'll all be for it.