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NASA's budget this year is roughtly $3.5 BILLION dollars...

The shuttle is the most expensive way ever devised to reach low earth orbit. Your thinking is exactly the problem with the space program, and as long as it remains the established doctrine, will keep space as an expensive irrelevancy.

The reason the shuttle is so expensive is because NASA failed. The main reason for that failure is congress. For twenty years everyone has been staring this failure in the face but no one in a position to change the situation has ever brought themselves to fully admit this failure.

Why should they? The only solution is to go to congress and ask for money for a replacement which congress isn't going to give. They figured out a long time ago that entitlement programs are a far more effective way to buy votes.

I have never said the Shuttle is the best thing since sliced bread... I believe the orbiter program is overly costly.... and the decisions made in the 70s, 80s and 90s by congress and even Nixon and even Reagan himself have left a long term legacy of problems with this program.

Congressional defunding of their replacements certainly hasn't helped matters either. But it is a far cry from criticising the shuttle program, and making the idiotic claim that private industry can and will do it better... it won't. Where we are today is at the end result of over 50 year of work, work that WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED without government backing!

And as to space being an expesive irrelevancy... I'll call the space program an irrelevancy, when IC chips are replaced by a truly 100% privately funded equivalent... When private industry truly 100% privately funds equivalents for insulation and heat disapation and obsorption etc etc... I don't see russia selling their flights at a cost that prevents it from being expensive... ANd forgive me if I believe it is far better than I see USA on the side of our rockets, instead of "PEPSI BLUE".

I am so sick of inanity of some of the people on here, who simply rant idiological tyrades over any sort of factual stand. Not a damned one of these whiners doesn't take their mortgage interest deduction at tax time, and most likely have FHA back mortgages that let them get their loans in the first place! As long as the public dole is helping their sorry asses out, no problem, don't mention it... but if something goes somewhere they think they know better then its a government conspiracy and theft.

I do agree, shuttle program is overly expensive, reality is, though regardless of how we got here, this is where we are. Most of that lies directly at the decisions of Congress back in the 70s. We can't change that, the only options are continue to work with what we have, or work to replace it... period. Can't turn back a clock and change a dicision made in the NIXON administration.

Launching things into space and having them either return to earth savely, or arrive on other planets safely is not a trivial task... we've seen the results of smaller, faster, cheaper... 2 lost missions to mars, possibly a direct link to the loss of Columbia... this IS ROCKET SCIENCE PEOPLE! To try to equate the space program with your garbage collection (hey why not let private industry handle it)... is idiotic. The idea that private enterprise of its own accord would have taken us to space, and be where we are today is comical... the costs are too high, and the direct financial payback is too tough to measure beforehand.