Posted 10/15/2007 05:56:00 PM by Douglas

Once again, The Onion nails it. If only this weren't too true to be funny.

NASA has suffered from a public credibility crisis in recent years due to perceived incompetence, a failed mission to Mars, the damaged and dormant Hubble telescope, and its inability to procure a long enough USB cable to reach all the way over to engineer William Chen's cubicle. But NASA officials argue that a secure high-speed line could prevent disasters such as a 2005 incident in which an employee attempting to download the movie trailer for Cheaper by the Dozen 2 crashed the Mission Control Center mainframe computer for two weeks.

Griffin may have an uphill battle convincing Congress to fund the project. As the NASA administrator himself admitted at the press conference, even if a workable wireless router is successfully purchased, engineers will need at least an additional two years to examine the owner's manual before attempting to install the complicated equipment.

Once the wireless local area network is completed, Griffin said that NASA will embark on its next great project: constructing a laptop capable of taking advantage of Wi-Fi's high-speed access by 2037.

Ouch. That's funny. And spot-on!