Stellar? The Shuttle’s flown over a hundred times, and every one of those missions would have landed safely had a handful of decision-makers operated the vehicle within design limits (Challenger) or admitted that they really didn’t have a clue whether something was wrong or not (Columbia). It’s the only reusable space vehicle ever made. It’s the only launch system capable of carrying humans that has traveled into space 9 times in a single year. In its day, it advanced the state of the art of nearly every system onboard it, from life support to fuel cells to avionics to propulsion. The first time it launched was with a human crew, and it completed the entire operational envelope from launch to landing without a hitch, despite the fact that only the approach and landing had ever been flight tested.
Compared to that, the current program is not truly reusable (even as much as Shuttle is), will not operate as many times in a year, will not even fly on paper (pogo) in its current paper configuration, will not substantially advance the state of the art, and will not carry any more than a handful of people into space over the next 20 years.
Why did we build a Shuttle in the first place? Because putting a capsule on an ICBM was too expensive for anything but flagstaffs and footprints. 40 years later, what’s changed? Nothing. The most forward-thinking view of a lunar base is “McMurdo on the Moon”. What impact does McMurdo have on your life? Aside from the few times you see it mentioned in a newspaper or magazine, do you even think about it? Why will “McMurdo on the Moon” be any different?
Not so stellar at all, in my book. A real space program would acknowledge that the principal short-range goal should be to reduce the cost of getting into space, and that the Shuttle made some progress along that vector, but not nearly enough. Everything else is just a means to convert tax money into astronaut memoirs, and when you realize that NASA will fly fewer than 300 people into space in the next 20 years, you realize there’ll be precious few of those memoirs.
If you spent 300 billion dollars to fly the entire House and Senate to the moon over a 20 year span, everyone would cry about what a colossal waste of money that would be. But by NASA’s own admission, it won’t even be capable of that…although it will spend that much money.
