02 Jun 11
Originally posted by KazetNagorraWell that would remove about 95 % of it anyway. BTW, folks in the US are rapidly building the infrastructure of commercial spaceflight. NASA seems irrelevant these days. They couldn't stop the Space shuttle after it got started which they wanted to do, finding out it didn't make spaceflight routine but ended up costing one billion dollars for each flight, a seriously expensive proposition. They tried to cut and run years ago but the sheer size of the project meant many politicians in a lot of US states had powerful incentive to keep the program up due to bits and pieces of it parceled out to a number of states so congress kept it in the budget even though it was well known to be a boondoggle.
Take a space shuttle and go to space. You have one month left.
Now they shot themselves in the foot by not planning for a successor to the shuttle, instead relying on the Russians and the baby steps of the commercial space program so for now there is no replacement.
Great thinking on NASA's part. I miss the old NASA I worked for in the 70's, when it was a can do organization. Now it is riff with bureaucratic inertia.
