Cussing at NASA (Score 3)

The NASA PR engine has long pandered to the US's puritanical values. One doesn't have to dig too deep to discover that Astronauts have been cursing since the Mercury program. More interesting is the relationship between ground controllers in US and Russia. As stated in the article, US ground control carefully plans and simulates every activity to make the Astronauts' difficult tasks as easy as possible. Russian policy is to train the crew well enough that they can improvise in any situation, which makes the 'you could have broke it' comment from the Russian ground control interesting. Were they talking to Shepard? Or was the crew not trained to repair the CO2 scrubber? Anyway, its no surprise to see a space project requiring more than twice the time and effort envisioned by the big heads.