Shuttle on the Rhine

From Siberian Light - The space shuttle, Buran, has been spotted sailing down the Rhine towards its new home, the Technik Museum Speyer in Mannheim, Germany. Once the pride of the Soviet space program, the shuttle only flew a single mission in November of 1988 before being shelved forever due to the collapse of the USSR and the cancellation of the entire Buran program in 1993. The cancellation, for me, was even a bigger shame on the U.S. space program. The Space Race we had with the Russians was what fueled us for decades. We sent fruit flies up in a rocket and the Russians sent up a dog. We sent a chimp in space and the Russians sent Yuri Gagarin, the first human. And they followed that up by sending the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova as well. But the U.S. finally won the card game when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. In this race, NASA wasn't a seperate organization filled with geeks and rocket scientists. NASA was us, Americans. We didn't say, "When is NASA going to send a man on the moon?" Instead, we said, "When are WE going to send a man on the moon?" And we need that once more if we are ever going to trully get off this planet and into points beyond the moon. Link goes to complete details.