And exactly what is your position on the manned Moon plans, Phil?
How exactly would shutting down the shuttle and abandoning the space station help man to return to the Moon? I've never seen you speak up for it before.
No question that the failure to use pressure fed liquid rocket boosters for the shuttle doomed the system as a whole to failure, along with the engineering limitations of the thermal protection systems available at that time. And the architecture of ISS could have been more efficient (see Mir 2 design at Encyclopedia Astronautica).
That said, the whole of Simberg's piece just struck me as being more of the same daily acid spew from the "Mars Enthusiasts" that NASA has been working under for a long time now -
ep