"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
dakotatelephone...
You have been served, space station:
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/a...-flight/39212/


From above:

"[The Space Station] does nothing for nobody and it never has,"
he says. "The cost of space station is 300 Voyager-class
satellites. We could have had multiple Voyagers landed or
floating in the atmosphere on every planet and on every moon of
every planet. That is what we gave up when we went with a jobs
program, which is what the space station is. And that's an
ungodly sin. And yes, I'm a human space flight person, but
listen to me. That's what we could have offered the public."

What he says is sort of true, at least as far as "exploration" goes. While
there is lots of experimentation on ISS, it's not exactly "exploring". And
yes, it's cost so much money (especially if you include the costs of the
shuttle program as used to support the ISS program), it's pretty much
gobbled up most of the manned spaceflight budget for decades.

I wouldn't mind seeing a suspension of the manned space program (outside of
ISS and Orion-lite) for the next 5 years just so we can get our house in
order. NASA currently spends far too much money on manned space programs
and too little on research and true exploration. I'd like to see a
LOX/kerosene engine developed in that timeframe so we can get rid of the
large segmented solids once and for all.

Any HLV built today would surely use large segmented solids and I've thought
they were a bad idea all the way back to the Challenger disaster, and my
opinion of them drops with every bit of new information I read about them.

Jeff
--
"Take heart amid the deepening gloom
that your dog is finally getting enough cheese" - Deteriorata - National
Lampoon