no_way,<br /><br />There are times when I wish that some NASA administrator back about 1972 had said, "Nobody told us to build this monstrosity, they just said that we should look into it. Congress, you will not fund manned space flight adequately to do the job, so we are going to stop messing around and shut down our manned space flight program. We will continue with the various research projects that are the bread and butter of NASA, and we might launch an automatic probe once in a while, but we are done with manned spaceflight. We cannot do it with sporadic funding, funding that is cut midway through programs, and fractions of what we say it will cost. To try to do so is gambling with lives, because that is what manned space flight means, sending people into space.<br /><br />"We cannot build one element of a system, we must build the whole system. We need to have several different launch vehicles, not just one. We need to have several spacecraft for people to fly in, not just one. We must conquer space one step at a time, if we are going to stay there and use it."<br /><br />Sometimes, I even go so far as to wish that the Apollo program had not happened, because that destroyed any hope of building the infrastructure needed to go to the Moon over and over again. We never conquered space, we sailed about in our little tin cans, hoping that everything went as planned, with no provision for developing space. It was all about proving our supremecy, which we did, and then we proceded to sit on our laurels, figuring that we were all done.<br /><br />The only real advance that Apollo brought was the microprocessor. The impact that it has had on the world, and spaceflight in particular, makes Apollo worth while. But it didn't get us anywhere, it just showed that we could go there. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> The secret to peace of mind is a short attention span. </div>