Were you saddened when the shuttle was ferried to DC?

[IHearBlackHelicopters]

I watched the 747 take off this morning and could not get past the thought that we have no space program anymore. I remember watching the first 7 astronauts take off when I was in primary school. They were heroes and the US was striving for excellence with no limits. I think we will regret stopping here. Now we have limits.

 

[Vince]

Don't worry. The US only publicly stopped sending spacecraft up. In reality, we have a secret base on the Moon.

 

[MreSmartypants]

I remember those days too, the flights of Shepherd and Grissom and Glen, the first moon flights and how excited we were about 'winning the space race'. But manned spaceflight is just too expensive. We can achieve our goals in space without sending people out there. The Space Shuttle cost us maybe a trillion dollars all told, and I don't think it did anything that couldn't have been done with unmanned rockets. It was supposed to save money by being reusable but it actually cost a lot more than single-use rockets. The Russians built one too, just to show they could, but they used it only one time because it was so expensive.

We're living in a time when everyone is whining our budget is out of control. Everyone wants a tax cut, but nobody wants to give up anything the govt. does. I'm surprised NASA still even has a budget after we no longer have Russia to compete with. The Shuttle lives on as a monument to what we were able to do when we pulled together, back before politics consisted entirely of one party trying to undo everything the other party did.

We've always had limits. It's just that we used to be limited to what was scientifically possible, and now the limits are financial.