Lunar mission to get the axe...

[August]

Originally Posted by goldorak

As you note 40 years ago people were walking on the moon (albeight at great cost and for less than a week between missions). Nowadays the most we can do is go 300 km up in the soon to be decomissioned Shuttle. How's that for full filling the promise of human colonization in space ?

No, its time to make human colonization of space a long term program.
You need visionary people for this and of course long term political support.
Spending lets say 500* billion dollars to make a space station over 15 years and once complete let it rot is not the way to make headway into human space exploration. Private industry or no private industry.

Actually this illustrates my point quite nicely. The goal of the Apollo program was never about space colonization, it was to get to the moon. An effort akin to being first to climb a mountain, we did it because it was there. Once that goal was achieved support for this politically driven effort faded.

You need continual economical support, and a clear long term vision of what infrastructure will be needed. Right now we are walking in the dark.
The Space Shuttle was not needed. It was a failure from day one.
Spending big bucks here and there without a clear idea of what one wants to accomplish leads to NASA. This has been the manned space program, a walk in the dark, day by day. It has printed FAILURE all over.

How do you expect to come up with long term taxpayer support if you have no clear vision, and how can you have a clear vision if you can't even define the reason for being up there? It's like packing for a trip without knowing your destination.

Originally Posted by razark

LDon't get me wrong. I fully support private industry taking over more of the aerospace industry and research. There are some things that are just not going to be profitable for a company yet. Let NASA do the research and non-profitable work. Let the private industry have access to the research and turn it into something they can make money on..

I agree. I understand there are also rather severe regulatory restrictions on private space ventures, especially manned ones.