Very good article, clears up a lot of questions, doubts, and misconceptions. It seems to me that the problems with the Shuttle program always came down to mone

Very good article, clears up a lot of questions, doubts, and misconceptions. It seems to me that the problems with the Shuttle program always came down to money. The Nixon Administration denied Nasa the necessary budget to build the larger reusable vehicle they originally envisioned, while simultaneously scrapping the Saturn manned program. As a space nut since basically I was 5 or 6 years old, when America was in its heyday of Gemini and Apollo programs (I was 10 when Apollo 11 astronauts kicked up lunar dust), space exploration was a given to me and all of my friends. It was assumed that we would just keep on building and growing our space program until we got to something that resembled Clarke/Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps we wouldn't make it by 2001, but some time not too far beyond then. Maybe 2011. Maybe 2015. It therefore makes me sad that we've been in this hiatus since about 1974, really 40 years of treading water rather than building much on the accomplishments of the past. Why not a permanent station on the moon? Why not a nuclear propulsion system that could get to Mars in 6 weeks? What have we done instead with our money, that is so much more worthwhile? Why was Nasa denied the $4 billion it needed to continue the Constellation program, while literally hundreds of billions were allocated for bank bailouts, automotive bailouts, etc.? Where are our priorities? I know these are controversial questions and there are probably some good answers out there, but I go back to the lost dreams, the sacrifices made by the Columbia and Challenger astronauts and others, and I wonder if we haven't traded big dreams for little ones and lost sight along the way of what we're all about.