Hi Billy,

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 2, 2010, at 1:51, [email protected] wrote:

> Manned flight in Space a "dead end" ? 

Not in principle. In practice, the space shuttle - because it was built in the 
1980s - costs around a billion per launch, last I checked. 

If NASA were to invest those billions in developing an agile ecosystem of 
innovation rather than an aging fleet of shuttles, we could make human space 
flight -itself- both cheaper and technologically relevant.

I'm not against space or NASA.  There are both interesting and valuable things 
to get done. But much of that can be done more cheaply -by- robots rather than 
human beings; in fact, being forced to do that would probably make improve 
technology faster!

I want NASA to spend it's money building the future, via science; not 
maintaining the past, via operations. 

You look at the -manned- spaceflight budget today and tell me what fraction is 
spent in actual real-world R&D versus operations. 

E

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