[Yorlik803]

First: Kudos for a Canadian newspaper for telling it like it is.
Second: The sheeple want bread and and games. They dont care about how great the country is. They want other peoples money,land and stuff.
Soon the Chinese flag will replace ours on the moon. It willbe a dark day when it happens.

[tanknetter]

First: Kudos for a Canadian newspaper for telling it like it is.

Um, not exactly. The shuttle program was really ended by George W. Bush after the loss of Columbia. But Bush was also the one who initiated the Constellation/Ares/Orion/etc program to get American BACK into space, back to the Moon and beyond.

And to be more accurate, while the shuttle was ended by Bush, it was really killed before metal was even cut for Enterprise by poor design choices that drove overambitious expectations and major engineering flaws. The two key among many were the need to make the payload bay large enough to handle the biggest USAF/NRO spy satellites (NASA wanted a smaller, simpler shuttle) and the decision to mount the return vehicle on the SIDE of the launch stack rather than on the top (see how the USAF's X-37 mini-shuttles are launched compared to the shuttle).

I've had a lot of sadness over seeing the end of the shuttle program and seeing the surviving shuttles retired, cannibalized and sent of to be museum displays. But I also recognize that, as someone who watched Enterprise's ALTs on a B&W TV and got to stay home (several times) to watch the first spaceflight of Columbia (this time on a color TV), those emotions are driven more by nostalgic remembrance of what the shuttle promised to be rather than what it actually was.