I agree, NASA should have spent the money on designing a better shuttle. But the gov't doesn't seem to care too much about space exploration as of late, which is very bad since we need new sources of minerals/etc.

As for the hubble, it can be upgraded and kept in use along with any other telescope they send up.

Those aren't signs that they care. Sending missions out simply to look for data is pointless right now. We need missions that will actually be good for us. Take the moon, from what I know the moon has big deposits of titanium among other minerals. We need to establish mining bases on the moon as soon as possible for minerals and as a ready made space station.

World peace will never happen... sorry to sound so pesimistic

Earth isn't going to get any better so might as well mess up other planets/moons in the process no? More minerals = more money/greed/wars = good thing

The constant flow of minerals to take over other countries and their resources?

Besides, if that space elevator takes shape, the cost of going to the moon will go down a lot.

The whole idea behind a moon base is this:
It takes a lot of fuel to do a round trip to any planet in our solar system. Not only does the craft have to carry enough fuel to lift off from earth, it also has to have enough to break orbit of the planet and return home. A moon base will allow fuels to be produced at a closer distance, it's like having a gas station in the middle of the desert, you wouldn't want to risk driving the entire way you may run out of gas. Also the moons gravity is much less than on earth so having an orbital gas station above the moon is certainly a good/cheap idea. We mine the fuel and send tankers to the station. A rocket blasts off from earth and passing the moon refuels with enough fuel and resources to say make it to mars and continues on to mars. On mars the craft lands and sets up another base. That base then converts martian resources to rocket fuel as well allowing the craft enough fuel/supplies to make it back. The point is that you break up the resources so that you don't have to carry everything needed for the mission at once.

Aigh that space elevator plan... I dunno about that I mean really, you would have to declare air space and have one hell of an anchor point

Avenger? Who are you refering to?

Money is the reason for our demise

Apparenlty, sacrificing your citizens and spreading "democracy" is more important than keeping your country alive and advanced.

Bush might call you a terrorist.

The Columbia accident occurred because NASA had never considered insulating foam to be a threat to the shuttle. Intsy-tintsy foam and space-age alloy leading edge, who would've thought it? So they redesigned the tank to get the shuttle going again.

Redesigning the tank was orders of magnitude cheaper than building a replacement.

The shuttle will be retired when the ISS is finished (international space station). That will be ~2010.

Nasa has put a request for proposals for the shuttle successor; the CEV. They are scheduled to have a 'fly-off' like the f-22 and joint strike fighter competitions in 2008. The CEV is supposed to an Apollo/Soyuz type of capsule. The CEV is going to be a primary building block of future manned space exploration.

The shuttle, although cool and worth alot of propaganda currency during the cold war was a turn down a wrong road. The system is just to complex to become the cheaply operated space-truck that was envisioned.

The Hubble: In My Opinion the hubble should be scrapped. Land based telescopes (the European Souther Observatory) get better pictures using 'adaptive optics'. The hubble was great, revolutionary, but it's time is passed. A mission to repair the Hubble would cost ~ $1 billion; that's alot even for a shuttle mission. It served us well, we should just let it go. On ward and upward.

One kilometer diameter nickel/iron asteroid contains $10 trillion + of material.

The technology for the space elevator is not ready yet and may never be. The entire feasibility of the thing hinges on making carbon nanotube polymers. It's not known if thats even possible yet.

Net weight at the ground would be zero .

Die hippy scum!

My question for you guys is; wtf do you do on the internet? You sure as h3ll don't read or research anything.

Well, building on the moon would save us a lot, theoretically. First of all, since the atomosphere is next to non-existant, it would be next to zero enviromental impact to launch anything from the moon. Also, you could build massive objects and only have to expend a fraction of the energy to reach escape velocity of the moon's gravity. Space exploration would take off rather quickly if we were to colonize the moon. I mean, consider that the moon would be much easier to lanuch stuff from, and you wouldn't have to ship everything elsewhere. For energy, you could even use nuclear power, and jettison the excess into the sun via a railgun. (much less power and effort would be needed to get rid of wastes). Either that, or you could quarentine an entire portion of the moon for nuclear waste storage. You don't have to worry about local's complaining, because it is nowhere near them.

Beh, I find the story (of Angels&Demons) easy to read, but it's no more than fast food. The way the plot is build up is simple and implausable and the way to create suspense is simply insulting ('... He looked up in horror as he heard the name.' next chapter, which contains only two paragraphs return to previous character some arbitrary unit of time later and reveal the name to the reader in fifty pages).
It's fine for fast food, but I'm seriously considering selling the book on e-bay or giving it away after I've finished it.
The DeVinci code has a plot that is follows more or less the same setup, as far as I've been able to tell upto now. Again, it's easy to digest fastfood, but not really worth the hype that surrounds it. And of course, Dan Brown makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't actually have a clue as to what he's talking about, and his linguistic arrogance (insisting English is the purest language in the world) doesn't help. I hear they're making a movie about it, which I'll probably see for the sole reason that Audrey Tautout plays the female lead (or that's what I've heard anyway).