"Would the public stand to lose a quarter of the fleet in a single day? Would it fork over another billion dollars to build a replacement? Would it stand for sp

"Would the public stand to lose a quarter of the fleet in a single day? Would it fork over another billion dollars to build a replacement? Would it stand for spending millions to train astronauts to be truck drivers, only to lose truck and drivers both?" Amazingly prescient article, but I don't think the author expected the answers to these heartbreaking questions to be "yes." Twelve-year-old me stayed up all night to watch Columbia launch in '81, and I watched the last flight of Atlantis in 2011; I still can't watch the Challenger footage to this day.