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Where Should Space Exploration Go From Here?
Since Congress has been steadily cutting back on support for NASA, Nick suggests this idea: "I'm sure there are many taxpayers out there like me that would love to see NASA's budget doubled. The problem is there isn't enough support to get congress to increase the budget by that amount, and I really don't want people to pay that don't care to. I propose an opt-in, one-time contribution box added to tax returns. I would require that my money be used only to advance the space program with either a shuttle replacement, an extra crew compartment for the space station, or a launch vehicle for a manned trip to Mars. Would you support a bill that would allow taxpayers to voluntarily contribute money to NASA? Are you ready to put your coin where your Dreams are?"
We will never get much farther unless we find a more efficient, less expensive way of building vessels and machinery. And you can blame congress and their love of pork for most of it.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
Science is not democracy. You can't get to the best decision if you let voters decide. The people at NASA are being paid to be experts, so my vote goes to letting them chart the course. Some mistakes will be made, but I'd rather that they make the decision rather than me and my neighbour, who both have been watching to much Star Trek and Star Wars.
If the Pentagon can spend $200B on the next generation jet fighter, surely the U.S. can spend and additional $20B over the next ten years doing the R&D and prototyping our next spaceplane. Oh wait, we have to build a missle shield first....
Here in Barcelona, not long ago, a pacifist organization proposed adding a box in the tax forms that would disallow the government from spending your taxes on defense research or contracts.
A lot of people signed in the campaign, but the government, of course, did not change anything.
Now imagine if something like this could be done in the USofA, which spends on weapons as much as the 10 next most-spending countries put together!
(All this data is taken out of UN reports, which I'm now too lazy to find...)
With just one year of the DoD budget, famine could be erradicated forever in this planet, and you'd have enough spare change to build another shuttle and send a mission to Mars!
Of course now the important thing is bombing Iraq because the stupid dictator there tried to kill someone's daddy *and* has huge amounts if oil...
If I have posted far, it is because I replied to giants.
While it's nice to think that we'll be pulling some cowboy bebop style shit and just pulling back the throttle on our Swordfish II and going orbital, we need at least an order of magnitude more efficient power generation, power storage, or drive technology, or some combination thereof. The bottom line is that it takes a huge load of energy to build an orbital craft, and it takes quite a bit to launch it. Piggyback designs have thus far not proved to be a solution though there is hope there, I will admit; Still, I don't think it's worth making craft capable of launching from a planet until materials technology improves considerably.
A space elevator would make it downright inexpensive to put things in orbit. If you reserve space, when it becomes cost-effective you can run a superconducting strip down its length (That's a long-ass strip of superconductor! But eventually it will become worth it) and plant nuclear power generation at the other end of the tether where you can simply eject the core if it fissions out of control. (Mount it on a rocket; If the pile goes bad, fire it at the sun.) You could also just put a gigantic solar array there; It should be affordable if it is cheap to put into orbit and has obvious advantages in terms of required maintenance.
In any case, the first step towards building a space elevator is building the massive structure which will have to sit at the other end. If we are going to accomplish this, we need to be working on ways to mine asteroids, smelt ore, form steel, and build structures in space. In other words, we need to be thinking about supporting mining engineers, steel workers, steel fabricators, and so on. It just doesn't make sense for us to be mucking around in space too much (more on this in a second) when it costs us so much, and it costs so much because of the fuel required to lift a given mass. Reduce the amount of mass you lift, this reduces the amount of fuel you have to spend, and the whole thing gets cheaper. Build a space elevator, and you don't even have to use fuel any more; The direct cost and the long-term environmental cost (Putting that much energy into a system always has some effect, and some of the stuff we're putting into the atmosphere is nasty) of a space elevator is essentially nothing when you consider how much traffic you will have if you make it cheaper, and how much less energy must be expended.
Here comes the later: It still makes sense for us to be sending out probes, and testing new technologies for space. But it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money on that. We should be spending our money on technologies which will bring us the space elevator.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
True, NASA has a long history of being a money hog, but it wasn't an issue until they were proposed a budget that was outlandish for anything (The $400 Billion Mars budget proposed by Former President Bush). But the benefits that they have given our economy in the years that they have been around have been huge, not to mention the lift that they have given the research and scientific communities. Without them, there would be nothing like cell phones, satallite communications, large-scale stellar observation (think of the pictures of the hydrogen clouds that have been in every Sci-Fi movie since the Hubble ST took the picture).
Beyond that, the overall economic contribution that the space program contributes is not just in scientific advancement. People often overlook the fact that while NASA takes billions of dollars in tax revenue, they also provide thousands of jobs. Not just to astronaughts like the heroes (yes, heroes) we lost with the columbia, but people from console operators, to sysadmins, to ground keepers.
Nothing in the history of the US has been a symbol to peaceful cooperation like the space program has. At the height of the cold war, we were able to work with our biggest enemy on a joint Apollo-Soyuez (sp?) mission. It represents triumph and advancement against odds, from the story of Apollo 11 and 13, to the tragedies of Apollo 1 and Challenger. It's given kids something to dream about, and actually tells us more about the universe we live in.
The answer is not where it should go, but rather how it should go on. Personally, I would like to see some privatization in the Space Industry, because that would greatly lower the costs of development and space travel. We also need more exploration missions like the Galleleo and Pathfinder projects, which brought a great deal of positive public spotlight to NASA.
The Pathfinder mission showed that NASA could get something done using economic constraints. However, there is a legitimate need for money just to get some of the basic maintinence done (such as the housing facilities for our remaining shuttles). We need to press farther out than the distance that our shuttles and the space station hit.
As a personal recommendation, I'd like to suggest a little reading that I found years ago. The Case for Mars by Dr. Robert Zubrin is an excellent book that shows both the feasibility, need, and purpose on manned exploration beyond our local little planet. It shows, realistically, how we could get the project done without an outlandish budget. While the project talked about at the end is no longer around, the MarsDirect project still exists. http://www.nw.net/mars/ Give it a look.
Remember, NASA is not just about Space Shuttles, but also about exploration and education. Things like those great space picture backgrounds would not be possible without them.
Actually, I'm willing to bet we will learn much more from those Jet fighters and that Missle Defense system than we will ever get out of the mostly political Internation Space Station. The F22 will be able to hit supersonic without afterburners. The Missle Defense system is pushing the limits in a bunch of different technologies, including advanced laser research.
Before you poo-poo Defense Spending remember that you have an Internet because of a certain DARPA project started in the late 60's. The Moon Walk was cool and all but how did it change your daily life? I would argue that the Internet has had a much greater impact on mankind than the moon walk.
Brian Ellenberger
Humans can do the things that robots cannot do. Humans can see the sights and be able to tell when a sight would take a good picture. Humans can make course corrections and such to avoid their craft crashing down. Humans can do science that is impossible for a robot to do. The shuttle needs to fly again and we cannot wait 2 years or more like we did when Challenger was destroyed. Remember, there are two American's and a Russian in space and a good chunk of American hardware up there. The Shuttle is needed because it's the only way the station has for maintaining a orbit. Boosts given by a docked shuttle using the OMS since the budget was cut to eliminate the module that would give the station inhabitants the ability to maintain the orbit on thier own. Single Stage to orbit and other alternatives need to be studied now. Not 10 years from now. The shuttle could make another 20 years, but in that 20 or before that 20 is up a alternative needs to be developed. Mars could be a destination for humans, but we need the station for this. Right now, I would be willing to increase my tax burden to make this possible if I had to. I would also rather there not be a stipulation that it would be used for the mars project. NASA Knows what they are doing. Safety concerns were raised recently due to the decreased budget NASA has. That tells me NASA knows that they were flying on a wing and a prayer, but could not do anything about it. Parking the shuttle in the interim for longer then about 6 months is not acceptable. Of course now it's ok, but sooner than later it will have to fly. Right now, there is no other alternative.
Gorkman
The point your quote misses out on, however, is that there is is no "reliable" way of getting into space. It's dangerous like playing russian roulette, you go up there with several thousand pounds of explosives attached to your ass, and you come back down in the middle of a plasma fireball. Between those two events you're seperated from an intense vacuum by nothing more than a few inches of steel and some ceramic tiles.
How many people have died trying to get into space? 14 from the challenger and columbia, shoot from the hip says no more than double that have died?
That is only the start of it. Many many more brave men and women are going to die trying to turn us humans into a spacefaring race. This is hostile, hostile environment and we aren't supposed to be going there if evolution has anything to say about it. Playing a game of tortise and retreating into our shell "for a decade" every time there's a problem is defeatist, not going to make space a fluffy paradise where children run free, and will in the long run increase the costs of space exploration because we get so wrapped up in our politicaly correct bureaucracy that nothing revolutionary ever happens.
Every man and woman who's died in space did it with the full knowledge this was one of the most dangerous jobs they could have picked. I see no reason to insult their sacrifice by scurrying under rocks, pretending like it's only a matter of time before a 100% safe route into space evolves.
Listen, it's this simple: you can throw a trillion dollars at the NASA budget, but it will never make space travel 100% safe. NASA knows that. Astronauts know that. I would venture to guess that the majority of /. readers know that as well. But Congress only appears to see NASA as either pass or fail. People live: pass. People die: fail.
// Personal note -- yes, moreMoney can be a negative value
if (!deadAstronauts)
nasaMoney += moreMoney;
else
nasaMoney = 0;
But, looking at the situation, it's about as logical as having Congress make air travel illegal after 9-11.
But no, instead Congress desides to throw gobs of money at national security to prevent terrorism, and yet they think that it's wise to pull funding from a program which does a much better job of uniting the word together.
What Congress should do is pay NASA $20 million dollars (I think their current budget is about that much) to paste a big warning sticker on the entrance door of each shuttle saying "You fly at your own risk." That way, they state their beliefs, the world has a chance to unite people from around the globe once again, and NASA gets extra funding. Problem solved.
As someone on Fox News pointed out the other day (paraphrasing here):
"It took man 66 years to go from Kitty Hawk to the moon, and in the 34 years since were have gone absolutely nowhere."
That was a pretty good summation of the problem with the Shuttle. It is a proof of concept, but hasn't expanded man's horizons.
I say that the tribute to Columbia's astronauts should be a man stepping on Mars.
Mod me down for saying this, but the honest truth may be the best next step in space exploration is to drop the manned program entirely, and spent the money on better remote probes and satellites. Three billion a year would buy at least 10, probably 20 or 30 pathfinder probes (or an improved model) per year. That's a lot of mars exploration. This isn't a popular view, but there are some convincing arguments.
First, one of the stated goals for the space program is to develop new technology. But when are you more likely to use the latest and greatest bleeding edge experimental engine? On a manned spacecraft where loss is catastophic to the whole program, or a relatively cheap robot? Fact is, the pathfinder mission used some of the fastest processors and lots of new off the shelf technology. They had some bugs with it, which is why it can't be used with a manned mission. Sometimes this approach (known to the press as "better faster cheaper") fails, but the point is its SO much cheaper than a single manned mission a failure is not really that big an issue. For the price of one year of shuttle launches we could send dozens of probes to mars (as said before).
Be honest here. While its said that manned exploration is a precursor to manned colonization, the hard fact is that it takes too much energy to put people in orbit. For a very long, long time it will be easier to use advancing technology to support more people on this earth than move them to space. Besides that, humans aren't adapted to live in space. The basic plan has always been to go to the final frontier...then build a huge enclosed, sheltered colony that the human colonists huddle in 99% of the time. Its like going to the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone then huddling in your Winnebago all week.
A far more realistic plan is to create a life that can live there. I imagine "big clanking replicators" : a huge factory with fairly familar machinery, all of it automated and only requiring human supervision to perform repairs. Mining machines, robotic rock haulers, nuclear power plants, smelters, presses, lathes, ect...most of the robotic tech similar to what you would find in a general motors plant. This facility would be built on the moon, remotely operated by people on earth. It would be capable of constructing the parts to build another facility (and so on). While expensive, it would be a fraction of the cost of human missions, and after enough replications be able to produce useful products.
Unmanned boosters blow up 4% of the time, and its nothing but a finanical nuisance. I've just described a plan that would develop far more advanced, bleeding edge tech than anything that could be used in a manned mission. The technology developed (better industrial automation, better artificial intelligence, better remote telepresense) would be immediatly useful on earth. A manned trip to mars would involve mostly old, proven technology, with a few exotic exceptions necessary for the mission. (such as a nuclear propulsion system, something NOT usable on earth)
I understand why noone will listen to me : there's an incredible glamour about blasting off our heroes into orbit, sending a man out in space to get the job done. Hell, I want to go too. But the truth is, without all the overhead associated with minimizing the risks to said heroes a lot more could be accomplished with the same money. In addition, the new tech and perhaps even real products from space would eventually provide a real return on investment, enriching us on the ground.
Well, I can't, since most of his points are absolutely accurate.
/manned/ space exploration. I think it feeds the human soul and imagination. You don't have to look much past the story of Dr. Kalpana Chawla (an alumnus of the UTA, where i'm graduating in May) to see how the challenge of space can motivate and inspire people.
Exceptions:
Buran was a 3/4 scale duplicate of Shuttle, not the same size. It also never carried a crew...its one mission was unmanned. Read more here.
A crew escape section (a jettisonable cockpit, for instance) is a good idea for launch related problems. Howevet, on reentry, it would be absolutely impossible to get the capsule a) protected from the reentry heat and b) away from the Mach 20 reentering shuttle. It would also be absurdly heavy as a retrofit. I do believe that it should be considered for next-generation reusable spacecraft.
The reason that the Challenger problems were left up to the "old boy" network is the same reason the same engineers that crashed Mars Pathfinder builts its successors: There just aren't a hell of a lot of people who know how to do this stuff. It's horrifically complicated, and the stakes are impossibly high. You don't just let a recent graduate (like I will be soon! Yay!) design a new Shuttle. Or even a system on the shuttle. You use experienced, seasoned engineers, checking and cross-checking each other. And you still have fatal mistakes.
He's also wrong about his (rhetorical) contention that throttling up Challenger's engines was fatal. The solid rocket boosters were already burning (fatally), and they are not throttled. As soon as those things were lit (that is, before it left the ground), the fix was in. That ship was going to die.
I do disagree with a lot of his conclusions. This fellow doesn't seem to be committed to manned space exploration. His discussions about going to the Moon (which is a dead end: Been there, done that) are red herring arguments.
My personal feelings on the future of the space program are very ambiguous. I use that word in the sense that I have very strong, opposing opinions on the topic.
I believe passionately in
However, I think NASA is doing a very bad job of stewarding our resources. They're given a budget (although I certainly wouldn't call it lavish), with the understanding that that budget will be returned to the communities around major NASA installations, and the contractors that supply them. Good engineering or no, that is the only way you can get any sort of large-scale project done in this country: Spread the wealth to as many congresscritters' pork barrels as possible. I don't like it either, but I don't know how to change it.
So, I want people in space. But I don't think that going over and over to LEO accomplishes anything. If I thought it would be possible to say "OK, we're not going to fly any people for five years, but then by God we'll start flight testing our Mars hardware!" I'd be a happy guy. However, I believe that if we don't keep in the habit (if you will) of putting people in space, we will lose the political will to do it. I think that would be Bad, because we (America and its partners) would cede to somebody else (China?) primacy in solar exploration. I think that's a Baad Idea.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
the Army's RAH-66 Comanche helicopter (Boeing and the Sikorsky Aircraft Division of United Technologies, $941 million); the Air Force's F-22 Raptor (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the Pratt and Whitney Division of United Technologies, $5.2 billion); the Navy's F-18E/F fighter plane (Boeing, General Electric, and Northrop Grumman, $3.3 billion); Joint Strike Fighter/F-35 (Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, $3.5 billion); the V-22 Osprey (Boeing Vertol and the Bell Helicopter Division of Textron, $2 billion) the DDG-51 destroyer (Bath Iron Works and the Ingalls Shipbuilding Division of Northrop Grumman, $2.7 billion); the Virginia class attack submarine (Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics and the Newport News Shipbuilding division of Northrop Grumman, $2.5 billion); the Trident II Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile (Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, $626 million); and the Crusader artillery system (Carlyle Group/United Defense, $475 million).
I'm familiar with all these programs, and unfortunately for those opposed to military spending, a good argument can be made for all of them. Military spending suffered massively in the last 10 years under the Bush and Clinton administrations, and the result has been a lot of insufficiently maintained and obsolete equipment. About the only program that you mention that probably should be abandoned is the F/A-18E/F purchase (and possibly the Trident II if you're convinced that we've found "peace in our time" and no longer need a nuclear triad) and maybe Crusader.
These are known as "cold-war relic" programs
No, they're not. They're necessary purchases if the US is going to have an effective military. The DDG-51 and Virginia programs are vital for the Navy (we've already gone from Reagan's "600 ship Navy" to barely 100 combatants). The Air Force needs the F-22 in order to replace planes that are probably older than most of the people reading this (1970s technology).
We could probably lose the Crusader (in fact, we probably already have in the FY2003 budget) and the F/A-18, but the rest of these programs are sufficiently vital that cancelling them would just result in having the money spend elsewhere on similar programs (for example, cancelling the F/A-18E/F would just mean a purchase of its follow-on aircraft unless you expect carriers to go to sea without any aircraft). There are lots of places where the budget could be cut (for example, Bush's proposal for an extra $25 billion for AIDS assistance to Africa would more than double the budget of NASA), but there really isn't that much pork left in the military budget.
People shouldn't go to space to do science.
People should go to space to explore.
Both are important to us as a species.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The answer has been staring us in the face for decades - Price. If we make space access cheap, the rest will follow. What we have done up to this point, is basic feasability testing. Enough already! We know its feasible. There are thousands upon thousands of amzing engineering papers that have been published that will revolutionize space travel and habitation. The one thing, the ONLY thing keeping it from happening, is the cost per pound to orbit.
And the sad part is, there are hundreds of designs that could and would reduce the cost to orbit from its exorbitant $10,000/lb to less than $100/lb. But you know what? All of the aerospace contractors have lobbied for years for these advances to be underfunded, never considered, or just plain cancelled.
I agree with the Cliff, I'm pinning all of my space dreams and hopes on the advent of mass-produced carbon nanotubes. Once they become available, the entire economics of space will change radically. Finally, it will make economic sense for even the most conservative corporations to invest in space industrialization.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
Like I said in my post, Bush said on the campaign trail that not all of these new programs were necessary
Unfortunately for Bush, he was mostly wrong. Yes, some of the systems could be cancelled, but they would just have to be replaced with something else because there is a necessary role for each of these programs.
Now I want the USA to have the best weapons in the world. I also want us to have the best space program. I think we can do both.
I agree. Unfortunately, over the last 10 years both the military and the NASA budget have both been cut; the place spending is out of control is on social spending, and that is a situation that doesn't seem to be changing under Bush (although, to his credit, at least he's increased military spending enough so that some vital programs are going to finally be funded).
Do we "need" all of the weapons I mentioned in my post? Do we need all of them now? Probably not
That's the problem with modern warfare; and NASA is suffering from the same mentality. National defense is a "come as you are" environment; if you don't "need" them now and thus don't spend money on them, you won't have them when you do need them. The same is true with NASA. We didn't "need" an improved orbiter in the 1990s, so Clinton cut the space budget back and killed off all the many, many promising programs that could have provided alternatives (Delta Clipper, etc) now that we do need them. The result of such policies is the tragedy we've just witnessed.
Clearly, we need to spend more money on space development (although perhaps, not necessarily NASA, who hasn't shown a willingness to embrace the state of the art technology as it did in its infancy). But we can't do it by cutting the military budget, because there simply isn't enough money there to cut. However, there ARE a lot of places in the social spending sector where money could be spent without such a risk. Bush's $25 billion for Africa/AIDS is one such place. Medicare/Medicaid is another. Considering that the long-term payoff for space (new pharmaceuticals, geriatric research, etc) development is more likely to solve these issues than direct funding would be in any case, it is simply more logical to spend money from these sources than to risk national security.
The upshot of all this spending is a few thousand jobs for engineers, programmers, and others in the tech field.
Just think of the millions of job openings for these same people if space were to become an industry rather than a curiosity.
If you want something to achieve commercial success, don't let the churches or the government dictate how to do it. Give it to some greedy, money-grubbing parasitic corporation (like MS, or IBM) and they'll find a way to bring it to us (and then jack up the prices).
For the record, I'm *not* suggesting we entrust future shuttle missions to Microsoft. Keep in mind, I want this to *succeed* with a *minimal loss of life*.
Like what I said? You might like my music
The disadvantage of having every crackpot trying out his own favorite launch vehicle is that sooner or later, someone is going to drop his launch vehicle on a school or a neighborhood...
There has to be some kind of space agency to regulate and review the crackpots, so that the inherently dangerous ideas are at least moderated. The space agency would also need to manage launch facilities for the better ideas, so that in case of failure there's a large body of water to drop the fireball into...
It shouldn't necessarily be NASA, though.
there really isn't that much pork left in the military budget.
I'd like to argue with that. Not in terms of cutting military development programs, but in terms of efficiency. A good friend of mine works for a large defense firm (baesystems), and by all reports they LOVE the US military. Why?
It seems that when they score a big contract from most countries, they have set delivery dates and tightly controlled budgets, as one would expect in a contract a modern, state-funded institution. Get value for money for the tax payers and try not to let things run over. It's just common sense. Under this system companies start to lose money if they go over time or over budget.
The U.S. military works differently. Defense firms love contracts from the US military because they just keep on paying and don't seem to care much about deadlines. The reasoning behind this seems to be "We want the best, we don't care if it costs the earth and takes until the end of time", which is all very grand and powerful sounding but ends up wasting money and time, all at the taxpayers expense.
Surely money could be saved by tightening controls on defense contracts and could then be diverted to other ventures such as space?
Now that the shock of the Columbia's loss has set in and we are starting to put together what exactly happened, I was thinking to myself what NASA should do to increase mankind's presence in orbit and how to go about it. It is apparent to me that the current Space Transportation System (STS) is in need of replacement. The last time we tried to do that was under the Space Launch Initiative (SLI) under the Clinton administration. That program was a failure, not because of Clintons people, but because there were technological and monetary hurdles that couldn't be properly addressed. However there is a way to do this. Right now the STS fleet is grounded, so the immediate concern is how to keep the ISS in orbit and fully manned. Russian President Putin has promised to build more Soyuz space craft to insure ISS is manned and supplied. From what I've found, it cost Russian anywhere from 25 to 50 million bucks to launch a manned Soyuz and a little less for a Progress supply ship. I would propose that the US discontinue any crew transport missions for the Shuttle to ISS and pay a significant portion of the money needed to keep Soyuz ships flying to ISS instead. If these ships cost 50 million bucks then there is a savings of 450 million bucks for each transport (the Shuttle cost 500 million to fly). When the Shuttle is back on it's feet, it should ONLY fly construction missions to finish the ISS. The the STS should be retired. That begs the question, what do we do with 450 mil for each flight that doesn't go? Since there are typically 6 or 7 flights by the Shuttle per year, about half of them are for significant construction of ISS. So we are looking at a savings of nearly 1.5 billion per fiscal year. THAT money should be invested in a completely new Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) space shuttle like the X-33 was meant to be. But that's not all. In order for space travel to become affordable, space vehicles must become more affordable. Building 5 space shuttles cost the taxpayers between 3 and 5 billion for each one (the Endeavor cost 3 billion because it was built from spare parts). If we could build say 20 or 30 space shuttles, the cost could possibly be cut in half or perhaps more. NASA doesn't need 20 or 30 shuttles, however, if we could get the European Space Agency (ESA), the Russians, the Japanese, Aussies, and even the Koreans to join up with the promise of owning their own shuttles, the cost could be easily be spread out. You see, the Europeans would get out from under NASA's shadow which they have for so long hated. They wanted to build a ship back in the 80's called the Sanger but they didn't have the money for it. The Europeans don't have the experience of space travel that we or the Russians do but they do have a lot of technology and engineering that they can bring to the table. The Russians are obvious additions because of their experience. What they can't bring to the table in money, they can definitly bring in know how. The Japanese have always wanted a manned space program but they too don't have the money to foot the bill all the way. In addition, their rocket program has suffered many setbacks. The Koreans would look on this as national pride IMO and rightly so. We of course know more about Shuttles than anyone and of course can bring more money to the table. America would still have it's leadership role in the project but would still have to work with members of the coalition. You see, I no longer see space exploration as an American dream. This is a HUMAN endeavor. We as Americans (or Russians) just happen to be better at it than anyone else. If we build a shuttle or two that can haul cargo and personnel to low Earth orbit in a cost effective manner, we will see more and more people going and that is the goal. Get more up there so we can do more. NASA has already learned that it needs to get out of the space launching business and get into the Space Exploration and Space Science business. NASA was essentially going to sell the Shuttles to the United Space Alliance and lease them back. The USA was going to maintain the Shuttles and NASA pilots were going to fly them. NASA needs to get away from the space monopoly that it has created so that competition can be built. The same thing happened when NASA got out of the satelite launching business after the Challenger disaster. Getting people to compete and getting a new reliable shuttle with the world behind it will establish a firm foothold in space for the human race. Right now we have had our foot in the door for too long and last Saturday it got jammed. Now it's time to kick open the door and step inside. Once we have a firm foundation in orbit and on the moon, then we can procede to the Planets and the stars.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
How about spending billions to save millions from AIDS ... only to have them die anyway of famine, civil war or another infectious disease? Africa has many problems which can't be solved with 30 second sound bites promising to throw money at the problem.