Anyone want a broken space shuttle?

By: Pete Horsley on: 02.08.05

After fresh reports today that NASA was ordering another space walk because the shuttle two worrisome pieces of filler material protruding from Discovery's belly, I happened to come across a short book written by Geraldine Bedell about defeating world poverty written earlier this year. She was outlining horrific statistics about preventable deaths. Things like right now one mother dies every minute in child birth (99% of these deaths are in developing nations), and one child dies every 15 seconds from bad drinking water. She emphasised the fact that these were preventable. How? A good start is through increased aid. She then put a dollar value on what is needed. And the cost to introduce basic healthcare is 100 billion dollars!! - a fair cop, yeah? But she then went onto say that this is the same cost of the space shuttle orbiting our earth. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for scientific discovery and pushing the boundaries of what we know by going into outer space. But the reality of our world is that we don’t give a second thought when we pay 100 billion dollars to put a space ship into orbit, but it seems like an impossible task to pressure our world's governments to increase aid to that amount. This is injustice. The fact that the shuttle is losing padding between some tiles is big news - why? Because 7 people could potentially die spectacularly as they re-enter the earth's atmosphere. Contrast that to how many will die while you are reading this blog. This is injustice.

At the end of the 18th Century three quarters of the world's population were subject to various forms of Slavery and serfdom, but by the end of the 19th Century slavery was all but gone as the anti-slavery movement got governments to act. It was commoners, many of whom had never seen a slave or had anything to do with slavery that took it up as their business and spoke out until something was done. What an amazing testimony to the work of God.

I read this stuff and it inspires me to push on and not to give up until we see a firm response from those in power.

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