Letters: Welcome home, Endeavour

Re “Shuttle crawls obstacle course,” Oct. 14

Thank you for your coverage of the space shuttle Endeavour’s final journey. The photos were inspiring, and you can see that the shuttle is a bit scarred from its travels but handsome just the same. She deserves the attention after her service to our country.

Thanks to Los Angeles for providing a home for this veteran.

Christine Chamness

Appleton, Wis.

I was among the thousands who attended the Endeavour ceremony at the Forum in Inglewood, and was at the corner of Crenshaw and Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards to witness this historic mission. I celebrated with the throngs representing the diverse Inglewood and South Los Angeles communities excitedly anticipating Endeavour’s arrival.

With this exhilarating backdrop, it is disappointing that The Times displayed on Sunday’s front page the photo of boys playing basketball as the shuttle passed. As Endeavour took its final journey to the California Science Center, why was it and its community’s grateful admirers not the cover picture?

Freddi King

Los Angeles

With the hullabaloo surrounding the shuttle’s trek through Los Angeles, we should assess the program’s overall outcome.

The program was approved on a goal that reusable shuttles could perform many missions per year. It was quickly discovered that the refurbishment process after each flight was extremely costly and drawn out. The entire program cost much more and achieved much less than projected.

There were also two disasters killing 14 astronauts, each creating a major and costly hiatus in the launch schedule.

There are far less expensive ways of delivering spacecraft into orbit and supplying the International Space Station.

Unmanned spaceflight is much less costly and can achieve many of the things that manned spaceflight can.

Jochen Haber

Encino

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