I also agree that if we’d continued the path blazed by Chuck Yeager and moved toward horizontal liftoff to orbit, we’d have much more benefit both to space travel (it would be cheaper and easier) and to planetary travel (ballistic suborbital passgener flights taking people from NYC to London in 45 minutes).

My main beef is that there has been essentially zero innovation in space vehicle technology since the 1960′s. In addition, NASA seems to be ignoring its best and brightest missions (Hubble, Spirit) and still can’t seem to come up with anything to put people into space, despite years of technological progress.

Now that technology has progressed to a point where non-governmental agencies can afford to put ships into space (and soon into orbit), mankind simply needs a reason to keep going to space. Columbus stumbled across the West Indies while trying to bring commodities to Europe. It sounds crass, but the monetization of space will be necessary before we start making a real effort to make our presence permanent.

Spirit and Atlantis represent the US government turning its back on the sky. Who will pick up the mantle that they’ve folded and tossed in the attic of history?

What was a sad day was to see a project sponsored my Microsoft send a person into space for far cheaper than the Mercury Project, and know that the trillions of dollars in funding should have been used more intelligently for space exploration.

Once the observatory is back up and running (and there’s a break in the weather), I’ll have a star party for the waterlogged.

But remember, if you like having all 10 fingers, don’t drink and CNC. Yikes.