>The CAR that keep breaking, with regard to the shuttle, I gueess is within the context of "keep sinking money into it to keep it going"<<br /><br />But the context of your analogy doesn't sit well. This thread - which poses the question opinion as National Treasure or "piece of crap" is leading to this poor analogy by association.<br /><br />You car may have been a piece of crap, but any association in the comparison is unfair, imho.<br /><br />This thread title poses an interesting question as to why it exists. I'm NOT aiming this at everyone on here, but there's a shift of public opinion based on the sudden belief that the STS is a "piece of crap" because some columnist who knows &%$#@! all about the STS decided to be an attention seeker - and/or - being a sheep to the rest of the mainstream media by going all "Tax Dollars - only LEO missions, it needs modifications and that costs money? Oh, scrap it already."<br /><br />It does seem to be lost on some of these people who present the STS to the public that this is not cheap, it's always work in progress, that STS-1 to STS-121 is part of the learning process of manned space flight and thus will exponentially need more money thrown at it as part of said learning process.<br /><br />To those Opinion writer "media" I would ask for them to realise there is a process, more lessons need to be learned, that it costs cash, that scrapping the Shuttle now would be damaging to the space industry beyond belief (note Griffin's comments on this - end of STS - gap - to CEV), that the money saved from such a scrapping would 99 per cent go back to Washington - not NASA, that the retirement is set, that the next generation of space flight is being worked on now, and to stop brainwashing the public that the STS is a "piece of crap," because this "piece of crap" is the work of millions and millions of man hours of the best people we have in the space industry - the same people that will get us back to the Moon and Mars.