> could ONLY have been done by the shuttle I'm certainly not one of those people and I actually have never met one. It's ironic that you flag the issue of str

> could ONLY have been done by the shuttle I'm certainly not one of those people and I actually have never met one. It's ironic that you flag the issue of strawmen then seemingly immediately create one yourself in order to argue an issue that has already been conceded to. We actually did spacewalks to inspect and practice repairing tiles. We had known prior to Columbia that strikes could happen and displace entire tiles. We had contingencies upon contingencies for this and we just completely dropped the ball on that flight. It was a combination of management and program failures on top of a compromised vehicle design. If you walk away from that tragedy with your only observation being the design of the vehicle was flawed then I fear you have completely failed to study the situation appropriately. I also think people forget what the prospect of conducting medium term orbital operations in the 1970s and 1980s was like. We didn't have deep space networks. We didn't have TDRS. We didn't even have GPS. We just _barely_ started putting stuff into geosynchronous orbit. Spy satellites used to drop film canisters into atmosphere to return imaging to Earth. The orbiter was a highly compromised design born out of an absolutely strange era between military and civilian use of outer space. It absolutely had problems; however, this hindsight view that if we had just built a different vehicle we could have done so much more or had more impactful of a scientific and civilian space program is not grounded in reality or the logistics of the program as a whole. > sucked up enormous amounts of limited money and resources on fundamentally worthless activities Here you are carried away and go too far. The 1980s were some of the most efficient NASA budgeting years and the total budget for NASA has been an absolute fraction of the entire nations budget. We consistently spend more on _worthless_ wars than on NASA. To say that these activities were "fundamentally worthless," again, is _precisely_ the attitude which annoys me so greatly. It's a foolish position that I feel can only be born out of absolute ignorance of all the things we did with that vehicle. NASA and our astronaut core worked as hard as they could to squeeze every possible benefit out of those launches and the testament of that work stands to this day. > Thank goodness for SpaceX You don't have to hate the history of the shuttle to appreciate SpaceX. Although for some people it does seem to be true.