For Old Parts, NASA Boldly Goes . . . on eBay

NASA needs parts no one makes anymore.

So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet -- including Yahoo and eBay -- to find replacement parts for electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primative.

This is just depressing, coming from an agency that in its hey day went from Mercury to Apollo, Redstone to Saturn V, in a decade. There is currently nothing even on the drawning board to take the place of the shuttle. Worse, the only suggestion is little more than a shuttle update. No new capabilties, just a retread of the same claims that were made for the current shuttle. Ugh.