NTV

I've been watching a bit of NASA TV the last few days to keep up to speed on the Hubble repair mission - as though it makes a difference if I'm up to speed on it or not. NASA TV has been on pretty much all day, for example, while two astronauts conducted a very long spacewalk to replace this-and-that faulty equipment on the Hubble.

Man, has it been boring! I'm all for this man-in-space stuff (Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface just scant days after my ninth birthday, and I've been a tireless if perhaps delusional defender of NASA ever since) but a full day of televised spacewalking is about as much fun as a full day of watching someone work on their car. Note to self: restrict yourself to watching the Flight Day Highlights and skip the live coverage.

Still, it comforts me in a perverse way that NASA has the same problems I do. I go to Auto Zone and buy a water pump for my car, and I go to install it, and it doesn't fit. What do you mean, it doesn't fit? How can the water pump not fit? It looks just like the old water pump, and the computer says it's the right part, but it just won't seat properly. The hell?? How many different kinds of water pumps for GM 350 small blocks can there be?? (Probably many, but don't confuse me with facts, I'm on a roll.)

So here's NASA, spending a couple of billion dollars on this repair mission, and one of the brand-new rate sensing units just won't fit. What do you mean, it won't fit? How can you spend such huge sums of money on the mission and Hubble in general and the RSU doesn't fit? The other two fit; how come the third one doesn't fit? The hell?? How many different kinds of RSUs for the Hubble can there be??

The difference is that nobody cares if I take a sufficiently large hammer to the water pump to drive it home, while hammering on the Hubble Space Telescope may not be the best idea anyone ever had (remember the scene from MST3K: The Movie where Mike broke the Hubble?).

Space hardware is not well represented in the world of scale modeling - the plastic model companies are too busy turning out Nazi stuff to make spacecraft. I'd be greatly surprised if there's any major (or even minor) German tank, warship or airplane from World War Two that hasn't been duplicated in model form. But how many scale models of the Hubble Space Telescope do you think there are? Not many, that's how many. It's hard for me to get really irritated by most things since the advent of cancer and chemo - compared to cancer and chemo, the various woes of scale modeling don't seem worth getting worked up about. But I still think there's something fundamentally wrong with the fact that the world abounds with scale models of Nazi weapons, but I don't know of a single worthwhile plastic scale model of a Soyuz TMA spacecraft, or the Spitzer telescope, or Pioneer 10, for crying out loud.