Good riddance, shuttles. I wonder how much exploration and exploitation was held back by 30+ years of being stuck on manned low earth orbit.
No mission to Mars? Only a very few asteroid missions (why not dozens)? Only a very few ionic propulsion systems? It would have been nice to have permanent robotic geologic and atmospheric stations throughout the entire solar system by now, rather than playing around in orbit.
Want to learn about our planet? Observe what happens to other planets, in detail, when you change the size, composition or temperature, and put the data into a matrix or two to start solving for the variables.
This is my opinion exactly. I am a big fan of Elon Musk and SpaceX. I often feel that we have accomplished nothing since the 60's and 70's in terms of spaceflight which is very disappointing. It's also disappointing to see how much money we have spent. Now Musk is doing everything NASA did and more at literally like 1 thirtieth of the cost. I really hope we begin to invest more as a society, but from the private sector.
The title is incorrect. The article is primarily about the Enterprise, the first shuttle that was built in the late 70's and used as a testbed for the technologies that would go on to be used in space-worthy shuttles.
An "orbital launcher" is something that gets a payload to orbit. That could be a rocket, a space plane, a space elevator, a pitcher with a very strong arm, etc. The Enterprise was most certainly not an "orbital launcher".
No mission to Mars? Only a very few asteroid missions (why not dozens)? Only a very few ionic propulsion systems? It would have been nice to have permanent robotic geologic and atmospheric stations throughout the entire solar system by now, rather than playing around in orbit.
Want to learn about our planet? Observe what happens to other planets, in detail, when you change the size, composition or temperature, and put the data into a matrix or two to start solving for the variables.