At the point where we didn’t have anything else to fly. We now have two alternative vehicles to fly, the Delta IV Medium and the Atlas V.

However, NASA refuses to fly them, continues to fly the shuttle, and then comes up with a 20 billion dollar development cost for a vehicle that has five billion dollars a years fixed costs, and won’t fly for 10 years, and then will only fly twice a year, to the space station.

My how far we have come. The only way we will recoup shuttle costs is by learning from our mistakes. We can fly the EELVs, retain SSME production, we can figure out a way to get rid of the foam insulation and make the cores reusable. Really, honestly, it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out these fundamental truths.

The space shuttle, since we continue to fly it, is the absolute best way to reduce future launch vehicle development costs. We should be keeping it around for that reason alone.

Krafft Ehricke would be screaming bloody murder by now. Since we can’t even build a reasonably sustainable space station, then we should immediately be embarking on a lunar station. It appears that NASA has totally abandoned science and logic for politics.

That’s why they call it an administration.

I know, reusable hydrogen powered launch vehicles and space ships. That’s just insane. What is wrong with these Americans?

— Donald

The problem is that it also may not be (in fact, almost certainly isn’t) good enough.

I agree with all of you that the Shuttle (at least as it was executed) was a technical mistake, but was it a political mistake? First, it was the offer on the table from the Nixon Administration. NASA could take it, or say no, and almost certainly end human spaceflight (at least by the government, and probably, at least in the short term, all human spaceflight by the United States).

Yes, NASA argued for the Shuttle, but it had become clear that deep space missions (which is what should have happened) were not on the table.

Developing and flying the Shuttle has resulted in a more-or-less unbroken chain of human spaceflight successes over multiple decades. That, in turn, has created political support. For most politicians today, human spaceflight is part of the background noise — they no more consider withdrawing from it than they consider withdrawing from building aircraft carriers. If you support government human spaceflight of any kind, that political background is critical, and the Space Shuttle project created it.

However, all of that is dwarfed into insignificance by the successful (so far) deployment of the Space Station — which is the market that is enabling COTS, the only politically realistic chance of a long-term dramatic reduction of the cost of reaching LEO — which is, lest we forget, “half way to anywhere.” It was done grossly inefficiently, but the political gears did spit out what we need.

In politics, like sausage, you never want to look at the details. You want to create the conditions that, however messily, will ultimately create the result you are looking for. That is what worked for the station and it is what I’m arguing for with the VSE. Perfection is not on the table, but “good enough” just may be, and killing what just might be good enough to try for perfection guarantees you get nothing.

If we are to succeed in creating a spacefaring civilization that involves Americans, I believe that all of you need to stop thinking like engineers and start thinking like politicians, however distasteful you may find the political process.

— Donald

You write that as though it would have been a bad thing.