[SteveDallas]

I hate to say it... no, I really hate to say it... we're talking about somebody who not only grew up with Star Wars and Star Trek (when he could catch a TV station broadcasting it in the semi-rural burg he grew up in) but could also explain the difference between the spacecraft used for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo and could describe in numbing detail every phase of the Apollo flights to the moon at the age of 8.

And what I hate to say is that it may be time to bag manned space flight. I'm still processing this one, big time... and I'm of the proper age that my formative "where were you" memory was "where were you when you head about the Challenger explosion", so of course like everybody else who has strong memories of that, this is deja vu all over again... (and damn I wish Richard Feynman were still with us) so I may change my mind... but even before this, I was starting to wonder if the effort to put human beings up there is worth it.

If you asked me to name the glorious achievements of our civilization in space, I'd have to say: Apollo. Pioneer. Voyager. Dammit, I used TRS-80 Model III computers in junior high that probably had more juice than Voyager. Viking. Galileo. Hubble. Pathfinder. And unless something goes wrong, Cassini is going to kick some butt in a couple years.

Needless to say, the common denominator is that none of these were manned EXCEPT Apollo. (And yes, Hubble was essentially useless as delivered, and a shuttle mission fixed it, and then another one upgraded it beyond original specs. And then adaptive optics brought into question whether it was worthwhile to have an orbiting telescope.)

So what happened with Apollo? My answer would be that it happened at a time when it was politically feasible to throw the money that was needed on the problem. Most of you probably know that we sent men to the moon and back several times, 30 years ago... and that even though we did it 30 years ago, we couldn't do it again tomorrow if we wanted to since we stopped (again for political reasons) developing the technology. I guess what I'm saying is, do it right or don't do it, and I can't see that there's any hope of it being done right in the near future, so we might as well stick with robotic exploration craft.

Either way I'm all for mothballing the shuttles. If you really want to expend capital (monetary and other wise) sending people up, then go back to the drawing board and design something new but informed by everything we've learned in the last 20 years. The basic shuttle design dates from the late 70s or so, and the last one (Endeavour) was built over 10 yrs ago in the wake of Challenger. If we haven't gotten our money's worth out of them by now, we never will.