[Rob Channell]

Reasons to keep going.

1. Technological advances. They come a lot faster when you have someone with the will and the means to push the edge a little.
2. The moon is a good jumping off place due to the lower gravity. Presumably the loss of bone density would happen at a slower rate with a constant gravity source for the occupants. With an ice source, water and oxygen are already available, saving the cost of transport.
3. The L5 Lagrangian point might arguably be a better jumping off point fuelwise since gravitational forces would be minimal, but there is also the problem of space debris that is an increasing hazard.
4. Unmanned missions are a good deal for the cost and a good supplement but to me there is no complete substitute for being able to send a person. It does make the problem more difficult and means that a solution has to be that much more reliable, which also has the effect of pushing the technology farther.

An interesting note on the SSME is that several of the parts are NLA. Either the businesses that made them are gone or they threw out the tooling while waiting on more work to come in and gave up to do other work. I personally do not think we have all the technology in place to build another Saturn V that would be as reliable as the first one.

The space program is suffering some of the same problems as our military in that budget cuts over a long term evenutally lead to reduced capabilities.

One thing I do not understand is the dichotomy of saying that we need to fix our economy by spending lots more money on new projects and in the next breath saying that we need to cut our spending and cancel a lot of projects.

I worked at Space Camp the first year they were in existence and I find it amazing how many predictions we had back then that were only 20-30 years away are STILL 20-30 years away.

I want to start mining asteroids. I call dibs on the one that is 4500 tons of titanium.