Is anyone else sick and tired of NASA playing the Hokey Pokey with the shuttle? I mean, come on guys, in the entire history of American spaceflight, 7 people have died in re-entry, 7 on liftoff and 3 before liftoff in the cabin. 17 people. That's out of hundreds of manned missions since the early 1960s.
Yes, I want our astronauts to be safe, but there is a point when safety gets to be the only concern and there is simply nothing ever accomplished. There will always be risks.
Look, space flight is dangerous. It has always been dangerous and it always will be dangerous. There is simply no way NASA can eliminate every single problem with the shuttle or any other spacecraft they decide to use.
Considering the number of missions the shuttles have flown, their safety record is more than exemplary. I haven't done the math, but I believe you'll find percentagewise that Amtrak has a higher fatality rate than NASA.
Meanwhile, as we are grounded, China and India work on their own space missions (China has already done a successful manned flight and plans to do an orbital flight this year), Russia is maintaining the space station on its own and we are locked onto the planet... and make no mistake, the lunar missions being planned by China, India and possibly even the ESA (haven't checked them lately) are a BIG deal and we are going to be in a load of shit if we don't start getting with the (space) program.
Why? The answer lies back with our old friend fossil fuels. You see, the moon very likely has a huge amount of farmable helium-3, a potential very powerful fuel source. Just a few metric tonnes of He-3 could fuel the entire United States for a year and make no mistake- whoever sets up a viable lunar colony first will control an extremely large, relatively cheap (once infrastructure is set up) energy source with high returns.
From space.com:
Researchers and space enthusiasts seehelium 3 as the perfect fuel source: extremely potent, nonpolluting, withvirtually no radioactive by-product. Proponents claim its the fuel ofthe 21st century. The trouble is, hardly any of it is found on Earth.But there is plenty of it on the moon.
And it doesn't end there. Microgravity could prove to be extremely useful for the development of new chemicals, especially pharmaceuticals, which cannot be developed due to the Earth's gravity. The amount of potential money to be made from space travel is astounding- but we can't even get our pathetic orbiter planes up there.
I think that NASA is on the way out. If there is any hope for America being at the forefront of space industrialization, it lies in companies like Scaled Composites, creator of SpaceShipOne and winner of the X-Prize for the first repeatable privately-manned spaceflight.
Unfortunately, any commercial use of such technology aside from tourism is probably a lot longer away than a viable Chinese lunar mining operation. NASA is really our only hope and we may have lost hope.