You left out several items.
First, the space race was not based solely on a manned race to the Moon, but also upon the widely held belief that Mars was an Earth-like planet that could be easily settled. With the return of the Mariner IV images of Mars, nearly everybody except a few Mars nuts realized that it was not really a very Earth-like planet. There was (and is) no there there. End of "space race".
The shuttle was going to be used not only to support a space station, but also a manned Moon base, and flight to Mars. While the overall architecture of the Shuttle is bad because it includes a human crew with every payload, the key flaw was when its pressure fed liquid boosters were replaced by solid boosters, for what appear to be political reasons. This political engineering was so bad that von Braun left NASA shortly after Nixon forced this decision upon it.
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Space/Science » in reply to Old scandal
and new nonsense. Ummm, Gary...
The whole thread (27 posts)
- The lost and forgotten missions
- Somehow an appropriate place to put this
- Saturn V