You should really read the article. I get the impression you didn't. Most if not all of your arguments are refuted.<br /><br />**I wouldn’t call the shuttle a failure. It is a very capable spacecraft. It might not be able to go to the moon, but it can carry quite a lot of cargo into orbit as well as bring satellites back out of orbit. It can carry out construction items in space as well as research. Despite having two failures probably is the safest manned spacecraft outside of the Russian soyuz (which has an equal number of failures). People tend to forget how few space flights that there had been previously. By the time of the challenger accident the shuttle had flown safely more times than any previous American manned program. I think the only failure was the inability to make use of the shuttle’s capabilities to further exploration and to properly follow up on it. **<br />-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> - It's a failure in the sense that it has prevented us from going any further than LEO, and sucks up much if not most of the space budget. It was supposed to fly many more times per year than it does. It costs WAY more to maintain it than projected- the manpower to inspect the 20,000 tiles and get it ready for it's next flight is staggering. What has it achieved for us in science and manned exploration? It hasn't made manned flight<br />any cheaper. The shuttle is a great piece of engineering and done some<br />great things (hubble, hubble repair, launched space probes), but it's got<br />more negatives than positives. Also, the gov't in it's infinite 'wisdom'<br />passed a bill before the Challenger disaster, that only the shuttle could launch satelites, so when challenger happened, we were screwed for awhile, and had to rely on the French Arianne rockets - how embarrasing.<br />Nasa was only good in it's 'heyday' when it had to compete with<br />the Soviet union, and gave us manned flight orbital flight and the