Vulture, I'm guessing you are one of those that believe we should be spending the majority of human spaceflight budget on things like air-breathing rockets, space nuclear power/propulsion, SSTO research, advanced life support systems etc with minimal LEO/ISS missions as opposed to taking what we have now and venturing out of LEO?<br /><br />I've thought about this for a while now, and I guess my personal take on it goes something like the problem with committing the bulk of NASA resources to technology research for say the next 10-15 years, is that whilst NASA is throwing huge sums of money at "investigating" whether some of these advanced concepts will work effectively, other nations like China will be off to the moon and grabbing all the international limelight for its exploits on other worlds. They will seen to be the new world space leader by many.<br /><br />At the end, we may come out with what apepars to be "Starship Enterprise", but it will have been at the expense of all those uninspired young people who walked away from sci/eng because of NASA's years of behind-the-scenes research and loss of national prestige. Plus imagine, if after all that our new spaceflight technology didn't live up to expectations?! <img src="/images/icons/frown.gif" /><br /><br />IMHO, its better to go to the moon now, with what we have and as we learn, identify challenging requirements for advanced operations/missions, industry (not NASA) will research and come up with the best possible solutions to meet those requirements. It might mean we stay with what appears to be 60's technology for longer, but long-term we'd be getting more value (on every front) from the human spaceflight program.