"Kyle Boatright" wrote:

For me, it comes down to this (choose 1):

- Continue manned space flight and recognize that people are likely to be
killed from time to time, despite the best efforts to prevent accidents.

- Discontinue manned space flight.

KB

Yes, those are the choices ** except replace "likely" by "certain" in
the first of these choices.

And in making the choice, recognize that if you want to perform
important and useful tasks with taxpayer money in space ** obtain
spectacular and otherwise unobtainable scientific knowledge, perform
extraordinarily useful and economically important engineering functions
like weather satellites, GPS, broadcasting ** then the basic fact is
that:

* There is NO useful role or need for sending people into space to
accomplish ANY of these missions.

* In fact, the enormous increase in mission costs and complexity and
the enormous limitations on performance required to include passengers
on any space mission and get them back safely pretty much guarantees
that no useful scientific or engineering results will result from those
missions ** as the history of our space effort to date fully
demonstrates.

If some want to argue that sending more people to the moon (or, God save
us all, to Mars) will somehow demonstrate the greatness of our nation,
well, they're welcome to do so (and I'd agree that the Apollo program
was probably justified, in its time, on that basis alone). And I have
no opposition to, and wish all good fortune to, private efforts in the
Burt Rutan style.

But our shuttle and Space Station programs should have been abandoned
long ago and their funding redirected to unmanned space capabilities and
challenges. Given the present and likely future state of space
technology "lunar colonies" are as utterly unnecessary as they are
immensely expensive; and the idea of sending people to Mars in the
foreseeable future is a fantasy. It's not a matter of policy choices,
it's a matter of the laws of physics.