We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684576 and marked it off-topic.

Hmm. Soviet cement mixers? Atop chemical rockets? Well certainly the latter is true. Every rocket we've ever sent to space is a chemical rocket. But cement mixers? I guess you don't have much appreciation for foreign engineers, but the Soyuz spacecraft is widely regarded as one of the safest, lowest cost space craft ever constructed. It's also been in continuous service since the 1960's, unlike any American program. You should read up on them. [1]

As far as military spending: im all for national defense. But obviously if you use your imagination, there must be some upper bound at which increases in military spending have a diminishing return. I think we are above that imagined line, and you think we are below it. But we both agree that a functional military is a valuable asset.

Also, I actually think military spending is a kind of socialism gone very wrong, where wealthy military contractors donate to politicians who then give them big contracts with public funds. Do you want your tax dollars going to corruption? I don't.

And do we NEED 11 aircraft carriers? No other nation on earth has more than 2. We have 11. Maybe we're overspending?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(spacecraft)

The shuttle was for the most part a terrible program. It cost an enormous amount of money compared to its benefits. It would have been cheaper to continue sending rockets than trying to maintain and fly the shuttle fleet.

That's not entirely true. The shuttle could do things no other ship could, including what's on the drawing board.

The shuttle could down mass a lot of stuff. Look at the long duration exposure facility, a bus-sized satellite filled with materials experiments. We have rockets to take that to orbit now, we don't have something that could bring it down. It's arguably the ISS, in its current configuration, would have been possible, and Hubble would have probably been abandoned 20 years ago without the shuttle.

The shuttle had problems, but its greatest strength was a gigantic space bus, built to take big satellites up and down. In fact, one of the biggest missed opportunities coming from the SpaceX camp I'm seeing is a lack of science and payload applications for the BFR/ITS. Example: the James Webb space telescope will be launching soon. It's a 6.5 meter telescope with weird folding mirrors because of the limitations of the launch vehicle. The ITS has a seventeen meter payload. Put a big fairing and a transfer stage on the ITS, and you can deliver gigantic payloads to orbit like we've never seen. Want a radio telescope at Earth-Moon L2? ITS can do that, but no one has even suggested it so far.

Right. You can google up the references, but a lot of the shuttle's design problems came from morphing it into a platform that could service military needs.

Its liftoff mass was 2/3 of the moon-bound Saturn V stack!

Make no mistake, I will hold deep, deep nostalgia for the Space Shuttle, but its failings were largely driven by 'irrelevant' military size and lift requirements. At the same time, I also understand that much of the money for the whole space-race, including the shuttle, effectively existed because of various military/'defense' priorities.

E.g. - recovering film from spy satellites.

Sometime around the time the shuttle went live, the military discovered CCD or similar cameras and encryption.

The "Keyhole" satellites used to parachute down film canisters, which would be scooped up by a plane while descending on the chute - caught in-flight to avoid capture by other nations.

Recover material from asteroids much?

> Obama and liberals in general assume unicorns will come protect them and that the military is bad.

Obama increased the military budget during his administration by over $800 Billion compared to his predecessor. [1]

If you're going to make a partisan "thanks, Obama" comment, at least pick something that is supported by facts.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/...

Check this fact, see the graph:

http://www.cfr.org/defense-budget/trends-us-military-spendin...

Even those graphs show that the military budget is higher now than it was when Obama took office. None of this is really helping to support your point about unicorns at all.

If the same is true in 20 years it will be a tragedy. But I expect cutting the shuttle program created space for private competition on that now-relatively-well-understood-as-far-as-space-things-go engineering problem and freed up NASA to focus on new challenges.