[no-s]

Look, the whole thing is still incredibly dangerous. Lives must be risked for manned spaceflight to succeed. We must honor the fallen by aggressively examining all aspects of the program.It's important to know what happened, how it happened, and especially why.

I feel the role of the government should be examined as well. Look at what has happened to all of the alternative launcher initiatives on the part of industry. Any that looked competitive with NASA were sabotaged financially by NASA. A program viable in all other respects must still operate with NASA's blessing.

All that is left of the fallen is an investigation, a memorial, and compassion for family and friends. We owe it to ourselves and the future to not let them die in vain. If we learn anything we must apply those lessons learned. And we must also look back to what is already well known, This is where I climb up on my soapbox, and please don't take this the wrong way.

Asking for a government solution here is asking for more of the same. NASA should be a research organization contracting out research. Building and operating a space fleet should not be in the NASA charter. There do exist current, viable contenders to NASA's space flight and research operations. This includes the Russian program, and private concerns currently operating outside the missle-launcher industrial complex, for example Kistler Aerospace comes to mind. We don't need cadillac programs. The most successful operating spacecraft available today is Soyuz, arguably 1950's era technology. If we want a replacement, a government program is the most backasswards solution, if at all possible. The competition and initiative required for a succesful NASP or SSTO is verifiably not present in the FedGov, or they would have already succeeded after 40 years of trying!

For further insight look up links to the Space Access Society. You won't find it at NASA, except in research.

[LS]

It's not necessarily true that SSTO won't work "because they quit trying." Many ideas need "vicinities" effects to work. For ex., the internal combustion engine was invented before Henry Ford, and even Ford's cars really didn't transform transportation until several things were in place: good rubber for tires; glass; a critical mass of car owners who demanded better (or any!) roads; Kettering's automatic starter; cheap gas (thank you, Mr. Rockefeller); and a host of other technological innovations that made a car worth OWNING. The same is true with scrams and SSTO: the challenges were so great that NASP had to master all at once. I think the program did a whale of a job getting the materials, the computational fluid dynamics (itself a remarkable breakthrough) and the slush hydrogen. Yes, the engine is key. But few engineers I've talked to think it is impossible---just that they haven't quite hit on the best way of doing it yet.

I think SSTO is the ONLY solution to space travel of any sort. Otherwise, there will never be a true "space station" of the "2001" type built.