I enjoyed the initial post in the original thread, taking it in the
spirit of a moderately clever kind of aviation-related standup comedy
routine.

And certainly no one has any desire to see the current Shuttle program
be terminated at the cost of, or as the result above, one more set of
crew fatalities.

But the bottom line here is surely that the whole manned space flight
effort and focus at NASA not only should be terminated as fast as
possible, but should have been terminated several decades ago, for at
least two major reasons.

First of all, manned space flight at this point in time is just too
difficult, dangerous, and expensive to be worth pursuing. It's a matter
of the laws of physics versus the currently available or currently
foreseeable level of technology, not the competence or the culture of
NASA. Maybe some future breakthrough in technology will make manned
space flight a much more reasonable goal; maybe not.

But by far the more compelling reason is that there are really zero
useful things, much less compelling needs, that we can or might want to
accomplish in space that are not better done with unmanned rather than
manned missions.

Something like two-thirds of NASA's budget for the past several decades
has gone into manned space flight efforts. Yet, essentially ALL of the
useful scientific and technological accomplishments in space to date --
space probes, planetary missions, space observatories, communications
satellites, gps systems, earth and environmental observatories,
surveillance satellites -- have come totally from UNmanned satellites;
and essentially ZERO significant results have come from manned space
flights.

Think about it: If you go into any moderately well equipped research or
manufacturing facility of any kind in any field these days, you don't
find scientists and technicians standing there turning knobs, watching
meters, and writing results in lab notebooks. You find instead either
highly automated, computer-controlled instruments and sample
manipulation equipment, along with similar observation, measurement, or
manufacturing apparatus, sitting there taking data, manipulating
samples, or modifying things, in many cases 24/7, while feeding data and
results back to hard disks and computers outside the lab, with maybe
occasional reprogramming from a scientist or tech at a keyboard in their
office or elsewhere outside the lab.

If you want to measure or observe or do anything in space, you put the
measurement and observation hardware in space, and keep the scientists
and engineers in shirt-sleeve comfort and safety on the ground -- and
you do this not just as as a matter of cost and safety, although these
are compelling reasons, but also because the observational and recording
capabilities of hardware these days far exceed the observational
capabilities of humans in any case.

Finally, just for the record, none of the above is to say we should not
have done the Apollo Project as we did it when we did it. That was a
much different era; Apollo was a proud and admirable accomplishment; it
was worth doing.

But now that we've come to understand a lot better what we really can do
and want to do in space using unmanned missions, and how unbelievably
much more it costs and how little we can really accomplish with manned
missions, we've just got to get over this astronaut hero worship phase
and start using our space efforts and resources much more intelligently.