  Less News Headlines Today, More Celebration June 30. It was to be the day Iraq regained sovereignty. But, the Bush Administration has apparently cleared up the day so my friend Devalina won't have to share her birthday with puppet regimes and false hopes for an entire nation. Now she just has to share it with the Cassini-Huygens satellite entering orbit around Saturn. Oh, and that little movie Spiderman 2 . urlLink NASA (Nasa, if you're in Britain), has a great site dedicated to the Saturn mission, 7 years in the making.
I visited the Flash version, which I highly recommend. My only disappointment was the elementary nature of the information provided, but seeing as how a disturbingly high number of Americans think Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks or that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, we need to start simple with the American citizenry. For proof of my Iraq & WMD claims, I point you to a Knight Ridder article from urlLink April 22 . The numbers have improved, but until less than 5% of the public stops taking President George W. Bush's assertions as fact, I won't be happy. But let's not let this get discussion get mired in politics. Behind Iraq and the military, NASA has managed to seriously increase its profile over the past year.
Have they made space interesting again? First it was the Mars rovers. Then it was urlLink Save Hubble! Now it's Saturn. Within a year, the shuttles will launch again to continue piecing together that already doomed International Space Station, thanks to President Bush's new space vision. Of course the ISS isn't going to last forever, but it is a stepping stone to a Moon base.
Why just write it off? Why work towards canning it after so much has been put into it? Hell, the space station is far better for studying what astronauts will have to go through to get to Mars, which is the 2nd phase of Bush's mission. Astronauts traveling to Mars will be living with no gravity for the duration of the trip. The space station provides zero gravity living. The Moon doesn't do that; it's gravity is about 1/6 that of Earth's.
Of course, none of this matters right now. As I'm writing this, Cassini is closing in on Saturn's rings, soon to actually pass through them and beginning a several year mission around the only planet in our solar system that could actually float in a lake, if there were a lake so big. The 2 headline missions for NASA right now are both unmanned, and many an unmanned mission will continue before a human passes beyond the Moon's orbit. In the meantime, I look forward to something far more academic on Saturn coming from NASA. And to Devalina: Salgirah Mubarak, or Happy Birthday in Urdu, the language of Pakistan. 
