Don't get me wrong, I grew up as a fan of space exploration and even watched
the first moon launch from about 50mi away in Florida as an infant. I hate
what Bush did to NASA, diverting its scarce resources to a purported Moon/Mars
mission that is impossible on a $15bil/year budget.

So now that NASA's paranoia has caused it to ground the entire shuttle fleet
until the insulation problem can be fixed, a fleet scheduled for dismantling
anyway in 2010. There is no way NASA can fix the fleet in time, so why even
bother? The $15bil annual budget won't be used to launch shuttles, and
there's no way in hell we're going to Mars with it, so it seems the most
economic solution is simply to eliminate NASA immediately. It already
abandoned all of its successful and cheap robotic missions to make room for
the purported Moon/Mars missions, and since we know those will never happen
it seems ridiculous to keep dumping billions of dollars a years on the agency.

Maybe NASA should use its $15bil to buy a few dozen Russian Energia rockets
and Soyuz capsules. It seems like primitive technology, but it can get into
space reliably and safely each and every time, unlike our trillion dollar
unusable shuttle which just sits there festering away at a cost of millions of
dollars per second. Or maybe NASA's budget should be given to the Spaceship
One company to develop nearly-equivalent vehicles at a fraction of the cost...