Another bitter rant!

On Jun 26, 2008, at 10:36 AM, ForDutyAndHumanity IAmSpacebearAICDA

> Just got my latest adAstra. Find it pretty depressing. An article
> about returning to the moon show Nasa's Constellation's program. In
> my opinion it's back to the Apollo program. And there is nothing
> WRONG with that, except for the little question screaming in the
> back of my head. WHY DID WE WASTE 30 YEARS WITH THE SHUTTLE PROGRAM?

There are lots of reasons for that (mostly relating to politics). Do
you actually want to discuss them, or just rant bitterly?

Also, the fact that we wasted 30 years on Shuttle really doesn't
affect what we should be doing now. We are where we are at the
moment, and the only question that really matters is: what should we
do next?

> If we made incremental improvements to the Saturn V over these 30
> years we would have built the space station and have started a moon
> base. On top of that we would have created these enormous
> artificial coral reefs off of the Florida coast with first stage
> boosters. And at the time there were ideas of putting a NERVA
> second stage on the Saturn V giving us the nuclear propelsion and
> power in space.

Would've, could've, should've... but what should we do now?

> I'm just going to have the blues till a very cheap method is created
> to put material into LEO.
> Maglev, Space Elevator, Space Tethers even bizzro antigravity
> breakthru, ANYTHING to make it cheap to put material into LEO and to
> start putting infrastructure to really do something!

I don't think we need any such bizarre breakthrough. The latest Ad
Astra also has an article on what I think is likely to lead to
routine, affordable access to space: the space tourism industry. In
just the last few years, and for the first time in history, human
spaceflight is being run as a profitable commercial enterprise. I'm
counting the Soyuz tourist flights here, which may be questionable due
to heavy Russian subsidy... but with suborbital tourism on the near
horizon, that question will be removed, and true market forces will
finally kick in.

I'm not sure we can count on NASA to do much of anything that's
relevant anymore, but in the long run it doesn't matter -- we're
finally making important progress anyway.

Best,
- Joe