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Travel to the moon does a lot of things but, under the present plans NASA has, the US will not be among the moon's visitors. NASA has a bad habit of "socializing" plans it knows it will never follow through on in order to maintain interest and, more importantly, FUNDING, for its carnival ride that circles the earth.

As long as our space vehicles are airplanes equipped with landing gear, NASA will not be returning to any astral body but the one we are on. Neither the moon, Mars, or any other space body has a landing field for the shuttle to touch down on, nor does their next planned space vehicle provide any capability to touch down anywhere other than good old mother earth.

Objective studies have shown that the dollars poured down NASA's space shuttle rat hole since the program began have failed to yield anything which could not be done cheaper and every bit as well on earth. The shuttle has failed to live up to expectations and NASA has covered it up with blather and lies.

I am a big supporter of space exploration, but I have become disenchanted with NASA and its re-defined mission to circle the earth every 90 minutes. Since they sold us the idea of the shuttle, NASA has had no inclination to return to the moon, much less conduct manned exploration of any other planet or body floating out in space. Whenever budget time comes around, NASA routinely floats the notion of a manned trip to Mars sometime in the next 15 years to increase their funding, but the dates of a Mars trip keep moving out.

China, courtesy of US technology and Bill Clinton, is reaching out to space to do what we failed: establish a colony and provide a base from which to launch missions into deeper space. As long as our space vehicles are equipped with landing gear and not landing or booster rockets, we will have to be content to sit back and watch the Chinese do what we were supposed to.

Dusty, I am with you one hundred percent. NASA run properly, (by me, say!!! More realistically by Jerry Pournelle and Burt Rutan, with the big boss being a General Groves (Manhattan Project) who is a real space person) would have spent the Shuttle money and time wisely. There would have been nuclear powered ships back from Mars since 1990. Satellite solar power would be on track to replace fossile fuels, and already supplying five or ten percent of the world's electricity. The might have beens!

Amongst other interests I have an engineering bent. I have been thinking about the Shuttle for thirty years, nearly, and my unhappy conclusion, well supported by numerical reasoning, is that the Shuttle on the concept level is deeply and hopelessly flawed. An accurate analogy is that making a space craft like an airplane is like making an airplane like a steam locomotive. Fine engineering has made this misguided pastiche, this kluge, this utterly unrealistically concieved misapplication of effort, function at all. I have been amazed for years that the tiles have been made to stay on during re-entry, much less the leading edge carbon-carbon hasn't broken or burned up before recent times. Besides many other things, why spend $10,000 per pound to lift the 200,000 pound Shuttle into orbit ($2,000,000,000) when you are just going to fly it back to Earth? Use the resources for Space stuff, not Earth stuff, for Heaven's sake.

What I hear from the military is that they are making a serious attempt to bypass the NASA roadblock to space, rethinking the whole thing from scratch, and building the heavy lift capacity at an affordable price that we so vitally require. There is a bunch of other military stuff that I "read in the tea leaves". I deal almost entirely with the public info, but am not totally out of the loop. Many good things are being done and our money is being spent very intelligently. All services are competing to show that they are the smartest and best, and of course, they all are!!

Be of good hope, support our people, hang tough, fight the Left stubbornly and efficiently (Schumer, of all people, has been coming out against American Wahabbism strongly, time to give the gun control nut a hand and show him us 2nd Amendment folks are nothing to be feared but instead respected and even liked - the enemy of your enemy is always, always, your friend,(but of course watch your wallet and silverware!!) and our boys will have the Cavalry ready in time to save the day.