[citation][nom]10tacle[/nom]That is the most ignoranus, idiotic, ill-informed comment I've read here in some time. First of all genius, we used the US military to give the USSR the beat down with our superior weaponry. Second, the US had a vision after the Apollo program (which again had NOTHING to do with bankrupting the USSR) to create a spacecraft capable of carrying large loads in orbit and returning like an airplane. Third, the amount of research and knowledge in science we learned over these past 34 years with the shuttle program is priceless.Fourth, with regards to cost, the shuttle program cost right at about $209 billion from start to finish today (in 2010 dollars). We blew nearly a TRILLION two and a half years ago on a "stimulus" bill that didn't do JACK for the US economy and jobs (that Democrats promised would prevent unemployment from going above 8%). Any more questions?[/citation]
The Shuttle did not actually meet it's mission requirements. It was never a truly reusable space craft. There were far more efficient ways of getting a payload into space, including rocket technology used in the Apollo and Mercury spacecraft.
The shuttle, unlike the Saturn 5, was never a classified project. The Soviet Union freely copied the shuttle (see the Buran). Star Wars, along with the shuttle program amounted to large, over funded, but ultimately unattainable programs initiated in the US that our economy could afford, while the Soviet Union trying to play catchup, could no. It was 1 major contributor, along with our nuclear arms race, to the bankrupting of the Soviet Union and it's eventual collapse. It is not the only factor. It is not the main factor. But it was a big factor.
We never directly, openly, had any conflict with the USSR. It was a cold war. But when we finally challenged our assumptions about how well the USSR's economy was actually doing, by forcing their hand to overspend with many of these Carter/Regan era projects, it was like calling their bluff on the success of Stalinism.
I feel that the space program could have been better served focusing on the space stations like MIR and the ISS, with less expensive transport systems, as well as newer space telescopes. The Shuttle Program became a big waste of very limited resources. One that was intended to inspire the population with huge dramatic fireballs during liftoff... All that knowledge could have been learned with less expensive rockets, pods, and stations.
You have to look at the big picture to see how everything fit together. It isn't some grand conspiracy. Just 1 aspect of history that was a part of a large way of flexing our economic muscle that contributed to the end of the USSR.
I didn't say space travel was stupid. Nor the study of science in space. Just the way we went about it...
/washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/obama-s-new-mission-nasa-reach-out-muslim-world
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