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POLL: Do you think the US should have continued funding the space shuttle program?
Please answer YES or NO, and provide a short explanation why.
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3 Answers
I believe the answer to this is both yes and no. No, due to the fact that the shuttle never lived up to its hype and was too costly to maintain. Yes, in that we should have been developing a replacement and should continue that work so that we are not dependent on another country for our space presence. While I applaud the individual commercial entities in space flight, I feel we need NASA's scientific and engineering capabilities to develop new propulsion methods and better reusable flight bodies.
NASA did a fabulous job in carrying out its mission to get us to the moon.
It is time for a new model to replace the shuttle which can incorporate all the knowledge gained from the shuttle program.
Let those who were working on things too risky for NASA work for startups and come out with far more interesting, cost effective, and potentially more valuable solutions.
Business is far more efficient at risk taking and market matching than bureaucracies.
No.
The shuttle program was a good program, but the shuttles are old, expensive, and more risky now. It seems to cost more to use and maintain them than the returns we were getting from them. And with the US being more or less broke, cutting back on spending on this program makes sense.
I do think that NASA should continue to get funding for many of their other programs - what they're doing with the various Mars probes and conceptual long term colonization projects continues to be impressive.
As Steve Buscemi said in Armageddon regarding the Shuttles: "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel ... and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"
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