There wasn’t the public interest or unlimited cash that the Apollo program had to work with, so this was never going to realistically happen in the 80s or 90s, shuttle or not.
Given the technology, there’s no way that we’d have gotten the relatively quick sugar rush like we did for the Moon landings; it’d have been a long, very hard, and very, very expensive slog to get people there.
There’s approximately a zero percent chance that the level of public enthusiasm for such an endeavor would have supported the amount of money and effort needed to make it happen.
Heck, we even cut the Apollo program short because the public quickly got bored with it once we had the big shiny.
Ah yes. Nothing like a little gross oversimplification to generate headlines.
If the shuttle didn’t exist, there are still a thousand things that would have had to go in a different direction to get a viable Mars program in the 80s and 90s. Not the least of which being that without the shuttle, and before the ISS, we would have no CLUE how to actually live in space for long periods of time.
So if we take it that we can’t go to Mars without learning how to live in space for extended durations. And we take it that in order to learn how to live in space we need to have a long duration presence there, like the ISS.
What exactly do people think was necessary to build the ISS…
You’re right boys and girls…it was the SPACE SHUTTLE.
Yeah i’d believe that. The more i read about the shuttle program the more it seems we were sending people to space in giant metal sarcophagi seemingly held together in duct tape.
Not that reusable spacecraft wasn’t a marvel of engineering, but it quickly becomes apparent that NASA was missing out on the funding they had back during the Race.
There wasn’t realistically the public interest or unlimited cash that the Apollo program had to work with, so this was never going to realistically happen in the 80s or 90s, shuttle or not.
Given the technology, there’s no way that we’d have gotten the relatively quick sugar rush like we did for the Moon landings; it’d have been a long, very hard, and very, very expensive slog to get people there.
There’s approximately a zero percent chance that the level of public enthusiasm for such an endeavor would have supported the amount of money and effort needed to make it happen.
Heck, we even cut the Apollo program short because the public quickly got bored with it once we had the big shiny.
