RUN!! Forrest!! RUN!!

Bob Noel wrote:
In article , Bob Fry
wrote:

It's time someone said that both the shuttle and the ISS have turned
out to be stupid ideas.

People have been whining about the space program for decades.

Well, maybe we'd whine less if it accomplished more. It took us less
than ten years to go from the atmosphere to the surface of the moon and
back. 36 years later we've gone nowhere.

On the 20th anniversary of Apollo, Bush Sr. asked NASA for a mission
plan for a Mars landing. The plan came back with a $200 billion price
tag. This number was deliberately cooked up to be as expensive as
possible to guarantee the idea would be shelved. Why? Because they were
afraid that if the Mars mission were doable we'd pull the plug on the
ISS gravy train.

There's an old joke that you're not a real country unless you have your
own airline and a national beer. Five years ago putting a man in space
was something only the superpowers had done. Now that Burt Rutal and
Paul Allen crashed that party, we either need to either s--t or get off
the pot. For the price of a shuttle launch we can send a robot to Mars
where real discoveries can be made. I'm fully in favor of manned space
exploration but all this ****ing around in LEO isn't getting us
anywhere.

-cwk.