Possible Shuttle launch Tuesday?

[Gurm]

Sputnik!!!!

[Gurm]

Ok my bad, I guess there is wild, whacky, and exciting stuff going on ... in the 80's. LOL.

I stand by my assertion that we just don't have the wherewithal to get back to the moon, nevermind to Mars, anytime soon though.

('Specially since the only guys who knew how to build inertial guidance systems keep... err... dying, and stuff.)

(One of my best friends' father worked as a senior manager for a major aeronautics lab, and he's rather fond of pointing out that he personally knows all the guys who COULD put us on the moon, and there's only like 2 left...)

[KRSESQ]

Somewhere back in the '70's, the space shuttle got seriously oversold. NASA could have taken a multi-vehicle approach with the shuttle launch system decades ago, but the agency got so wedded to the shuttle that all other considerations were ignored. The orbiter is overcomplex and overspecialized. It sucked up resources from unmanned programs. If the engineers and politicians designing it had sacrificed payload for range, it would have been a much more useful vehicle. Working in tandem with a heavy lift booster, NASA would have been a much more productive agency these last 25 years.

25 years? OMFG.

Kevin

[Lizzard[MPE]]

what would be the point to visit the moon again?

[Nowhere]

Not only visit. It's a good place to start interplanetary missions from, source of fuel for fusion reactors, radiotescopes/telescopes on moon have much better conditions than on Earth (especially since the former one can be shielded from Earth)

[Dr Mordrid]

Not to mention that projects like cataloging Earth-grazing asteroids and comets are best done from the moon, especially from the dark side.

Dr. Mordrid