And also who we were and how we became the people we are today.

This week in my daughter's High School class (I don't remember which class
she said it was) the teacher listed almost 50 archaeological discoveries
made by the Space Shuttle crews or experiments carried aloft on the Space
Shuttle.

My daughter said most of the discoveries were in the middle east, northern
Africa, Central America, and the northern portions of South
America.  Temples, trade routes, lost cities, and other hidden sights or
features were the majority of the discoveries.  She said that while some of
the discoveries were the results of planned research, others were
apparently accidental discoveries that resulted from land and resource
experiments - many of which couldn't justify their own satellite and
satellite launch, but which were able to hitch a ride on the shuttle at a
cost that made the experiments possible.

They then proceeded to watch portions of shows that had been on The History
Channel and The Discovery Channel that referenced the Space Shuttle
research that lead to finding "lost cities", etc.  In the case of some
sites in Iraq and Israel, the timing of the discoveries made from the Space
Shuttle was critical.  Had the research not been performed when it was, and
archaeologists arrived at the sites even a few weeks later, the sites would
have been destroyed by development.

Somehow the use of the Space Shuttle as an archaeologists tool just seems
to show what a remarkable (and multi-purpose) device the Space Shuttle is.

John

At 2003-02-07 08:16 AM, Wirt Atmar wrote:
<snip>

>But most importantly, the program is a mechanism that allows us to ask the
>most religious of all questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? And
>where are we going? -- with the real hope of obtaining at least a portion of
>the answer. It is our time's equivalent of building the great cathedrals of
>Europe, buildings that often required several hundred years to complete and
>greatly stretched the resources and imaginations of those who were building
>them in their attempt to answer the very same questions.

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