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The figure I came across in an exhaustive two-minute search was about 300 kilometers (although whether that's apogee, perigee, or average I don't know.)

Cheaper is more useful. Rutan isn't a big deal because he nearly equaled Gagarin's first flight, he's a big deal because he did it twice, cheaply.

Rutan's work is novel, and useful, because he does the same old thing, cheaply. Getting to the Moon is in the realm of the ``same old thing'', and if he gets some financing, I suspect he could embarass NASA with a cheap, successful moonshot, though it would cost his backers much more than $20M.

I keep talking about Rutan, but he's just the poster kid for a whole lot of people with interesting ideas.

The fact that NASA doesn't think that it is worthwhile to develop cheap spaceflight makes my point, I think.

Yeah the American schools somehow forget to mention or deemphasize the first man in space, first woman in space, first open spacewalk. Now I'm not trying to disavow the great feats achieved by the American space program but I especially like this list of "firsts in space", with tiny paragraphs devoted to the first HUMANS(Russian) to do things in space and the large, detailed paragraphs devoted to the first AMERICANS to do anything in space, since we all know that the first American in space is of course a much more monumental achievement for the entire human race then just the first person in space.

For someone who sees these feats of human courage as universal it's a little shocking and sad to see so many educated Americans who have absolutely no idea about any of these events. These should be viewed not as Russian/Soviet achievements but as human achievements. Forgeting these pioneers is just an insult to their courage and sacrifices.

A few years back, PBS ran a series named the "Red Files", and Episode 3 dealt with the Soviet's Korolev Lunar Lander.

If I recall correctly, they interviewed a NASA engineer who was able to take a tour of the lunar lander and compared it to a "flying garbage can". It really was awful, there were analog gauges and whatnot littering the interior - basically one step shy of having Cosmonauts just jump out of the orbiter and hope for the best!

True, was about to naming Lem myself. Unfortunately some of his novels are little too close in the future or were, when he wrote them. In particular, I think of "The Astronauts" which he wrote in 1951. In German, the book's title is "Planet des Todes" and I'm not sure if it has ever been translated into English. At least it is not listed here. Well, the bottom line is, that the book, which deals with the topic of alien civilisations, space travel etc, was written 8 years before the Sputnik was launched, 10 years before Gagarin made his first flight! Well, the "mistake" was, that the book lists some "historical events", among others intercontinental delivery via rockets (Lem calls them "rocket trains") - supposedly happend in the 60's. When I read this book first somewhere in the 80's, I really scratched my head and had a looong look into my history books... :-) Otherwise, the novel is great, though. A typical Lem. Seems to me like this was one of the first books he wrote (if not the first one).