NASA administrator says space shuttle was a mistake

So the US Government screwed up??? This has NEVER happened before! Oh wait...I mean it ALWAYS happens. Never mind.

It was a political decision by Nixon based on normal earth experience. The shuttle was a sort of a bus or shuttle bus to transport human load and cargo to and from space stations never thinking of the enormous risk, expense and difficulty.

Looking back it made perfect sense at the time.

personally i have no time for space exploration, the U.S spends billions on finding other planets when they won't help sort out poverty on their own. sort out your own planet before you go looking for others to screw up.

personally i have no time for space exploration, the U.S spends billions on finding other planets when they won't help sort out poverty on their own. sort out your own planet before you go looking for others to screw up.

Tell it to Queen Isabella. With a philosophy like that, Columbus would never have sailed.

To a degree, I agree. The initial idea, if I recall, was to use the Shuttle and Space Station as a platform for deep space exploration.

However, we never really funded it properly which was the mistake.

Too many trees to hug?


Welcome to A2K.

I don't have a lot of time for it either. But if I did I'd be off to some extraterrestrial paradise by now.

So, in what way is the moon the "right" path?

What ARE the aims of the space program?


Personally, I would want to see more and more exploration of other planets, by no means necessarily by people.....

you wanna be the first space rabbit?

I am sure many of my kin have already been.


I am really curious. What IS the current NASA thinking on the "right" aims, does anyone know?

The original plan called for a 2 vehicle inventory to get us to the outer planets.

There was going to be a heavy lift rocket to get large parts of a space station and parts for a moonbase into orbit.

There was supposed to be a 'space plane' based on the scramjet concept (Much like the vehicles that competed for the X-Prize recently), this was to have brought the inhabitants/workers of the space station to and from the station.


From the station, we were supposed to head to the moon to establish a base and then assemble a ship at the space station to take us to Mars and the outer worlds.

The problem was ... budget.

NASA, Congress and all the beancounters looked at all the pieces and said:
"We can only get funding for a small part of what NASA is asking for"

The powers that be took, shrugged, and said:
"A heavy lift rocket is of no use if we cant get people up there, and the space plane is no good if there is nothing to bring the people to"

On the drawing boards was a plan for a 'moving van' spacecraft that had been dismissed as to inefficient and limited in use during the heady days following the moon landing. It did however have one advantage... compared with the other programs ... it was cheap. (Relatively speaking)

So they looked at the moving van and said to themselves:
You know, if we put in some seats and some beds, I guess the 'moving van' could bring people up and down... and maybe we can pack some extra pieces onto the 'van' so it can build the station.

It was a wrong decision then, and its the wrong vehicle still.


My bosses dad worked for NASA for a lot of years and he said that after the moon landings, NASA had some amazing plans that would have put us on the moon, Mars and with a few stations by now, but the money tap was turned off after the landings. It broke his heart that they went with the 'moving van' as he still calls it.

Of course, if we took only a part of the $224 Billion the government has spent on this war there would be plenty of money for space research.