Tarrasque Wrangler said:
I'm a little skeptical about Aldrin's numbers ($15 bil for a launch platform as far out as L1? I'm sure the ISS came with a much lower pricetag than $100 bil when it was first proposed too) but his vision is clear and true. I'd say the first priority is to mothball those expensive deathtraps we call the Shuttles. Russia's been doing just fine for years without a reusable vessel. It seems like with the ISS to carry out scientific research, the Space Shuttles are no longer as necessary as they used to be.
I agree that the Space Shuttle has turned out to be a not particularly suitable launch vehicle:- too expensive (something like $500 million per launch AFAIR), not particularly safe (no launch escape system, solid rocket boosters and a fragile heat shield made more fragile by having wings*), and too large for simple crew-resupply missions.
But... The problem is that the ISS (which is still a long way from completion) has been designed on the assumption that the shuttle, with its big cargo bay and robotic arm, is available to carry new modules into space. If you had no shuttle, and had to launch the modules on unmanned expendible rockets, you'd have to rethink the whole assembly process and probably the design also.
I suppose what I'm saying is that it's like the old story of being lost in the country, asking a farmer how to get to your destination, and being told: "Well if I wanted to go there, I wouldn't have started from here."
I'm not sure what they can do, although I'm inclined to say that while it is still incredibly expensive in space, it makes no sense to spend money on anything other than making it cheaper to get into space.
i.e. Pour everything you have into building a spacecraft that basically just flies into space and lands with airliner style economics. Then start spending money on space stations, the moon, Mars, asteroid mining, solar power stations etc.
* You don't actually have to have wings in order to fly. You can make what is called a "lifting body", where the actual shape of the fuselage generates lift. But you have less ability to track sideways when you are re-entering. The shuttle was given wings so that on USAF missions (NASA needed to share funding with the USAF) the shuttle could launch south from Vandenburg on a near polar orbit, deploy a satelite, then land at Vandenburg at the end of the first orbit. Since the Earth would have rotated underneath it by then, you need to be able to track sideways to fly that mission profile (otherwise you'd land in the Pacific, several hundred miles off the coast of California). The need to launch USAF sats was what created the requirement for the large cargo bay. So an alternative NASA only shuttle would have been smaller with a much blunter shape, which would have been easier to build a heat shield for.
There are details of NASA lifting body research planes here:
http://www.astronautix.com/project/nasgbody.htm
And a picture of one landing here:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/m2f2.htm
(The real-life footage of that one crashing was used in the opening credits of "The Six Million Dollar Man". The pilot was very badly injured and in fact lost an eye, but unfortunately in his case, the only technology NASA had available was an eye-patch).
