D
dobbins
Guest
Since the Apollo Soyuz test program the US manned space program has had several periods of space plane induced grounding.<br /><br />24 Jul 1975 to 12 Apr 1981 5 years 8 months 19 days<br />28 Jan 1986 to 28 Sep 1988 2 years 8 months<br />1 Feb 2003 to 26 Jul 2005 2 years 5 months 25 days<br />9 Aug 2005 to 3 May 2006 (hopefully) 8 months 24 days<br /><br />That adds up to 11 years 7 months 8 days, over a third of the time between the last Apollo hardware flight and the tentative next Shuttle flight. A longer period of time than elapsed between NASA coming into existence in October 1958 and landing a man on the Moon in July 1969.<br /><br />In addition there have been several attempts to develop another space plane, all of which ran into budget and/or technical problems. Despite this we still have the space plane fans demanding, not asking DEMANDING, that we do another one.<br /><br />I'm not willing to watch the American space program stuck on the ground waiting for a Gee Whiz space plane for almost 6 years after the last Shuttle flight like I did after the last Apollo hardware flew. I'm fed up with space plane induced groundings. I want something that gets astronauts into space, and I don't care if it looks like Apollo, like Soyuz, like a big Mercury capsule or like the rocket in Flesh Gordon (Yes Flesh, not Flash).<br /><br />