1207:<br />Inexplicably, NASA and the industry spent a gazillion dollars on a SSTO...<br /><br />Me:<br />Hardly. That was one of the problems and still is. I call it the cost barrier. NASA budgets are simply not adequate for development of such advanced technologies without a paradigm shift in how projects are conducted. That shift may or may not occur with private enterprise, only time will tell. But NASA gets nowhere near a gazillion dollars for anything.<br /><br />NASA annual budget today is about $17 billion, and about half of that is for human spaceflight, much of which is ISS/STS operations.<br /><br />As for the technical ability to do SSTO? Apparently thats still beyond us as you pointed out. However, when the resurgent SSTO effort began, evidently NASA believed they could do it because the original SSTO demonstrator was the Delta Clipper which was originally funded by SDIO and later turned over to NASA when SDIO lost interest.<br /><br />1207:<br />The Single stick CEV and the Heavy lift launcher which is essentially a Shuttle C will work fine. I wonder how much they will cost given historical NASA launch costs.<br /><br />Me:<br />Again correct, but relying on expendable or even partially expendable launchers will not ever lead to a robust anyman in space capability. SpaceX and Kistler type efforts may eventually get us there but I'm thinking something more innovative such as that which Rutan/Scaled Composites, Bigelow, and Richard Branson are doing. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>