Over on mommycool a thread concerning the current shuttle mission and potential problems they're facing led me to make a few comments on the shuttle program which I thought I'd repeat here (with a few edits and a little expansion), even if it's just for my own reference:
The shuttle was never seriously more than a budget-driven choice that was over-sold to the public. We need to have a goal such as a permanent and expanding manned presence off Earth, be that a lunar base that would be gradually expanded into a city, or a similar approach to a long-term colonization project on Mars.Each has its good points, with the Moon being closer, rich in various natural resources which could be processed for use, and is relatively simple to launch from. Mars has more of a potential for human habitation, though even the most ambitious terraforming operations would put off open-air existence for well more than a century after serious work at altering the atmosphere began. Still, it does offer our best opportunity for that in the solar system. The Moon base may be critical to developing the ships we need to properly approach Mars, and if we can get some specialized industrial base going on the Moon that would be an excellent spot to lob various cargo vessels towards Mars, landing much-needed processed materials on the red planet in advance of the colonization effort.
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I don’t mean to knock the shuttle itself too strongly, but it never lived up to its billing. That it represents the best we have in manned spaceflight over 35 years after landing on the Moon approaches a national disgrace. Some wonderful things have been done with the shuttle, with many brilliant people making the best use of the tool at hand, but so much has crumbled around it. With respect to the high frontier of space the current state of affairs is really where we would have reasonably expected to be by the end of the 1970s. It’s as if the automotive industry declared the 1974 Plymouth Duster the pinnacle of automotive design and has just been coming up with patches and enhancements for it ever since.
A great deal of the problem is that NASA’s early accomplishments and Space Race glamor created a protective shield around what eventually became almost just another bureacracy. When the funding cuts hit post-Moon landing (because the Nixon administration/that era’s NASA directors didn’t establish another, inspiring goal) NASA had become another top-heavy organization interested more in maintaining its members jobs than in anything else.
Please keep in mind I'm only looking at the state of the manned space program, and not making an overall comment on what we thought the general future of 2005 would be back in 1969. We've done that dance before, and generally agree that nearly ubiquitous computers, the Internet, CDS and DVDs, etc. were all largely things we didn't consider 36 years ago that we wouldn't want to live without now. This is just looking at what we had every reasonable expectation of seeing from the space program three and a half decades after the Moon landing, versus what we have.
Unmanned, robotic missions certainly are much more cost effective, and it could easily be argued as unethical to risk human life at this stage of the game. That's a valid view, too. What we're lacking is a larger goal and a necessary sense of urgency. The space race of the very late 1950's and the full decade of the 1960s was the finest endeavor - perhaps the only really worthwhile project (aside from the formation of the Peace Corps) - to come out of the Cold War. When the Cold War reheated during the Reagan/Bush era it was a military and potential war profiteer-driven affair. A largely wasted decade. (Please, don't bother to push the battle to kill Communism on me. The folk history that getting the USSR to overspend itself into collapse was some noble, planned strategy is absolute bullshit. Revisionist history, as false as the message of that jump-cut between Reagan saying "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" and the wall coming down. )
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