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Just my two cents. I love NASA and space stuff, both manned and unmanned. I have watched Shuttles land in California and take off from Florida. That said, the shuttles are pretty old and beat up at this point. They were supposed to be cheaper in the long run than single-shot ships like Apollo, but they are much more high-maintenance than the original concept was claimed to be, so it's unclear if they're really cheaper than one-shot ships would be, whether Apollos or something bigger like the new Orions are going to be.

Soyez ships are one-shot and built new every flight. Very dependable due to having worked the bugs out and improved the design in stages, and no maintenance or refurbs, just discard every one.

The ISS was and is more a political boondoggle than a real research tool, IMHO. Nice for world peace and all, and nice for medical/physiology studies of long-term effects of space flight. Nobody's going to use it to manufacture miracle drugs or alloys that are too difficult to make on earth (due to differential density-driven fractionation during crystalization) or any other production jobs. Research sure. Too expensive for production.

Will ISS ever be a way-station for missions farther out (Moon, Mars)? Probably not. For Moon missions, there's not much point in stopping off there on the way up, and from an orbital energetics perspective, there's no realistic way to stop off there on the way down. Mars trips, too early to tell. There have been proposals both for assemble-on-orbit missions, and for missions which don't bother doing that. Coming back from Mars, at least the energetics aren't as bad as trying to stop off coming down from the Moon, but there's still little reason to bother, and after a two-year mission, of which the last six months were in transit back from Mars, who's going to want to hang around the ISS rather than getting back on the ground? OTOH, it would be a good place to leave the earth-return-reentry module of a Mars mission parked, rather than dragging it all the way to Mars and back. So that's a potential good use for the ISS in the long term, if we get up the gumption to do a manned Mars mission while it's in place.

The worst problem of the ISS from an American perspective is that it is in a high-inclination orbit so it's easily accessible from Russia's launch location. The Shuttle gets to it at a cost of nearly 1/3 of the payload capacity being unused (the cargo weight has to be reduced to get to the energetically less favorable orbit of the ISS compared to what a Shuttle can lift into orbits with inclination more suitable from Florida). That turned out to help (ISS being Russia-accessible) during the period of Russian-only access after the Columbia accident, but it has always been a big limitation on construction of the ISS. And while this would be a big detraction from using the ISS as an assembly-point for a Mars expedition on the outbound leg, since it puts unnecessary weight limits on components, it doesn't detract from using it as a return stop from Mars for transfer to the earth-reentry lander.

But, my guess is, we're going to spend so many decades fumfering around before we put up a Mars mission, ISS will have been decommissioned before we even start. After 20-25 years on orbit, the technology just starts getting too old to maintain even just on the inside. I agree that B-52's and all can be re-fitted and be useful machines for much longer. But they are put in hangars and really stripped down for upgrades and big overhauls. Every fix or upgrade to the ISS down the road will be done by an astronaut and mostly from the inside. Not as bad as fixing your car while cruising on an expressway, but not nearly as easy as doing it anything in a factory or hangar, just from the perspective of having the elbow room and so on. And any outside repair takes even longer, the whole suiting-up rigamarole just to replace one part or something. I'm not saying it's not worth building. I'm just saying, a realistic life estimate of the ISS will be maybe 25-30 years, 35 max, counting from its debut mission, and we likely won't have a Mars mission by then. I hope we do, but I wouldn't bet on it. So the way-station mission is kind of unrealistic as well, IMHO.

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Thanks guys for the thoughtful responses. Let me comment on both together.

1. Personnally, I think the whole shuttle program is and always has been a giant boondoggle, and have known it is one from it’s basic inception, as I grew up with the space program, and went to school with the sons and daughters of the engineers and scientists and military men who got us into space, the first time, and I watched Alan Shepard being launched from my high school yard. One of my ‘girl’ friends, not girlfriend, was Sigi Diebus, daughter of Dr. Curt Diebus, 2nd in command under Werner Von Braun. Aand my brother is a (now retired) NASA design engineer. We both personally worked on the shuttle at various tijmes in our careers.

The shuttle was a political abortion from the start, each individual launch costs on an average of $500,000,000.

The all comes about from the initial problem, that the original NASA proposal cost too much (up front), so they had to change to the ‘cheap’ design, (where the costs were backloaded - wouldn’t show up in the initial budget). And to top completely bawdlerize the great engineering aspect capabilities we had at the time, which were to finely demonstrated on the Saturn Project, congress got involved, deeply, because they saw the $$$$$. And in order the get any continuation of a space program beyond the sataturn program, at all, they (NASA) had to design it so that part of the shuttle was ‘built’ (put money into) in 75 separate congressional districts. The abortion that resulted was the shuttle program.

2. Personally, I think our long distance space program is focusing totally in the wrong direction, as we realististically can only take years to send small tinker toys to our solar system. We are concentrating on the wrong thing, rockets will get us only a few miles, and they really hurt you if you don’t ride them just right, and they tak a looooooong time to get anywhere, as the distances are so vast. So we should be investing, seriously, in finding some sort of trancendent propulsion technology such as finding out what gravity is, and how can we cancel it, to move quckly and easily.

However, this has a major drawback, in that if NASA were to find out that, then they could probably figure out how to put it into cars and homes, and so then the huge energy conglolorates, gas, oil, hydro power, states, nations, dams, etc, would no longer have the control/income they need to maintain their grasp on power.

So ....., I do what I can, to keep them from killing our foolish brave space pioneers too fast, and especially too repeatedly, by making the same mistakes over and over.

Both shuttle disasters could have been prevented, and the problems were known years before the accidents, and in the case of the challenger, the fix was designed and sitting on the shelf for 18 months before the disaster, but wasn’t implemented because ‘politically sensitive’ schedules; and the colombia, we all new was an accident waiting to happen, and they just wouldn’t pay any attention. There is lots of stuff I personally saw, that was never reported to the public, and just how close various shuttles came to disaster, by mear seconds, or inches, or luck, is amaing that we have only lost two, so far.

PS Sigi Diebus was a super hot chick in high school, with an IQ of about 150 to boot. Last I heard she was happily married with thre kids. So, don’t tell me all hot chicks are dumb.

There was just a report that they are going to fix the ragged blanket on the orbiter with an on board sewing kit.

2. The ‘meteorite’ - space debris hit on the leading edge of the left wing, which i started this thread, was invalid, and actualy due to ‘thermal expansion/dcontraction’ of two sensors????

3. However, most importantly, they apprently have lost gyrosdcopic control of the space station, where the orbiter is currently moored, due to a computer language mix-up between the russian and us portions of the space station, when they unfirled the new solar panels that were just brought up, and the whole unit - space station and orbiter is basicly out of control only held very tenatively stable by the tiny thruster rockets on the orbiter, and therre is only a small amount of fuel to ‘control’ the massive station and all its wings and panels. If they don’t get it fixed by tomorrow, apparently, the space station will have to be abandoned, and its orbit will decay and it will come crashing down on us.

Now, this is just an unverified report, at 0020 CST on 13 June and not reported by NASA or the media yet.