>Don't forget that the actual cost >of every Shuttle maintenance flight (despite NASA's attempts to cover it up >with highly creative bookkeeping) is about $1 billion. That's one hell of a >lot of additional money for a trickle of useful science.
They'd make those launches anyway, for one reason or another because they have the fleet of shuttles and they'll always find something for them to do even if they don't assemble/service the ISS, so you would save nothing by whishing the station away. There is no viable alternative to the Shuttle for human spaceflight. It is now running about as efficiently as it ever will. It is simply a costly business. You may well think that the logic for human spaceflight is circular (we fly in order to study how we adapt to being there) and it may be so, but that doesn't mean that it has no purpose. Indeed, it could be argued that in the long term the future of our species depends upon making the transition to a spacefaring civilisation. I for one would be happier to have a colony on Mars continue the species after an asteroid wipes the rest of us off the face of the Earth, than if our only legacy was a robotic probe on Mars working through its fault tree trying to figure out whether its comlink had failed or whether we'd all died. dmh == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
