First test launch of the Orion space capsule:
It should have been clear to all by 1986 that the Shuttle was a technological dead end. The Shuttle did give us Hubble and, thanks to the five servicing flights, Hubble has been doing stellar work for two decades. The International Space Station would probably have been a lot harder to build without the Shuttle.
But the Shuttle was taking us nowhere other than Earth orbit. It's been over 40 years since an astronaut was outside of Earth orbit. It's long past time that we're back in the manned deep space game.
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2 comments:
Those flares of light would have given me fits if I had watched this live.
The shuttle was not a dead end if it'd been used to construct and maintain a Von Braun space station to be used as an orbital base for further manned exploration outside Earth orbit. It would have been just one component of a robust manned space capability in that case. But of course that did not happen, because Saint Ronnie the Raygun decided that the space budget was better spent on refurbishing long-obsolete WW2 era battleships and space raygun missile defense boondoggles, and by the time his successors inherited the smoking remains of the manned space program, they had to practically rebuild it from scratch because all the people who'd taken us to the moon had died or retired. Not that they were any more interested than Raygun in manned space...
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