It's 1968 All Over Again...

...with noisy protestors and NASA projects vying for air time.

Despite the protests in New York being dangerously close to the flagpole, NBC cut away from the Today show to live coverage of the Delta IV Heavy lift off from Cape Canaveral, lofting NASA's Orion spacecraft on its maiden voyage. This is the first step of a proposed Mars mission.


I was torn. On the one hand, I was happy to see spaceflight getting some attention from the hairspray-'n'-teleprompter crowd, even if their awed cooing sometimes seemed disturbingly like the monkeys circling the monolith at the beginning of '01.

On the other hand, this is launching a rocket to orbit: Dammit, by now this was supposed to be as routine and uneventful as pulling the family car out of the garage. I should have been watching this video from a Hilton on the moon.
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