Discovery blasts off from Florida after over 2 years off line. Hard to imagine, but there's been no manned missions by NASA for 30 months. That's a long time, and really brings into focus the seriousness of the Columbia disaster and how long it's taken the investigation and redesign work to be completed. In fact, some were saying that maybe the shuttle had reached it's end of life, and should've been scrapped. But, what is there to replace it? Like Concorde, there seems little large development work ploughing ahead. Some of us may remember HOTOL, the British/European venture into manned flight, but that seems to have gone quiet too.
And if all that's not enough, it now sounds like the same problem as before, namely debris falling off, has struck again. Lumps peeling off the tank, which has supposedly been redesigned to not do this. Admissions are coming out that perhaps they were wrong in believing the redesign worked. I just hope the backups in place on board will allow them to get back without a repeat of 2003 
