I might catch a lot of flak for saying this, but I don't really think the space shuttle blowing up today was a tragedy. A tragedy, to me, is several thousand people starving every single day in almost every African nation while we sit idly by and get fat in America as our rates of food consumption increase every year. A tragedy is, like, homeless people dying on our streets while we walk by them and turn our nose as they ask for change to buy food, and a government who'd rather ship them to another country than deal with their problem. Seven people dying in a space shuttle crash is not a tragedy. It's sad, but it's not sad to a tragic degree. The space program is a stupid thing in the first place. What's the point, really? The only reasons I can think of are the quest for knowledge, which I don't know if this justifies death or not, or a desire to find new materials to exploit on other planets. I think we'd save our country a lot of money if we disbanded NASA and sold the parts. Who really cares what's up there? This wasn't the first space shuttle crash, and it won't be the last, I'm sure. How come if seven people die in an auto accident it's considered a nuisance, but seven astronauts die and we hold national mourning services? Anyway, I don't want it to seem that I'm putting down astronauts, I mean, it takes balls to go out into space. It's just that I don't understand why we need the space program or the American people's desire to turn everything into a tragedy. It's like ever since September 11th, we are tragedy addicts. We need our fix every few months. We love space crashes and people getting stuck in mines and snipers. We're such a fucking egocentric country, we need this shit so bad. It's like kindling for our patriotic fires.