🚀 go-pugleaf

> Even granting its problems, we DO have the shuttle; no-one else
> presently has anything nearly as zippy...

Anything nearly as zippy, no.  This has nothing much to do with usefulness,
though.  The Soviet hardware consistently does almost everything better than
the Shuttle does it, albeit less glamorously.  Almost the only thing the
Shuttle does better is return of payloads from orbit -- something that it
does only occasionally and which is no longer seen as a major use for it.
(By the way, the Soviet shuttle is apparently on the pad at Baikonur.)

> ...  Come on now, we know how to build expendable lift
> vehicles; there is no fundamental problem stamping out more Titans
> and designing a new heavy-lift vehicle.  A few years and a few
> billion dollars, and our short-term problems will be solved.

However, our most fundamental problem -- the damn boosters cost too much
and fly too seldom -- will NOT be solved this way.  This is a big, nasty,
serious problem in both the short term and the long term.
-- 
"There's a lot more to do in space   |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
than sending people to Mars." --Bova | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry