> For well over two decades, we've been sending the same parts up with ant farms, politicians, old people -- doing more public relations than science.
>
> Now we've got a chance to actually slap NASA around and mothball the shuttle fleet. This is the perfect time to shift focus to Mars Direct.

A point I need to make: there *is* science going on on the space shuttle missions. Experiments that need to be conducted in space, usually because they need zero acceleration due to gravity.

To quote the link (which, needless to say, was written up long before this morning's tragedy), "STS-107 [...] will give more than 70 international scientists access to both the microgravity environment of space and a set of seven human researchers for 16 uninterrupted days." For instance, one experiment conducted on STS-107 required microgravity to gain new insight into fire suppression. There also were other microgravity experiments to research better medicines and combating prostate cancer.

Lucky Wizard