The program the "W" "articulated" has the US sending men back to the Moon, then on to land on Mars.

Why go back to the Moon as a major manned objective? From a political and technological standpoint we've already been there. Let the Chinese or others do that as their major objective.

The Constellation program technology would easily support missions to Near Earth Asteroids that would that could provide major scientific returns while helping prepare for long term deep space manned missions. It would also be seen by the World as a major step BEYOND the Moon.

Such experience would put us in a position to mount a manned ORBITAL mission to Mars. Such a mission could work in conjunction with a fleet of rovers on the surface of Mars. This would allow synergy between manned and robotic probes by allowing the orbital crew to use telepresence in near real time to greatly assist in the robotic exploration of Mar's surface.

Samples from the robotic exploration could then be lifted to Mars orbital rendezvous with non-man rated vehicles for return to Earth with the manned vehicle.

Such a mission is within current or near technology and would probably be much more affordable than a manned landing on Mars and would also have the advantage of being able to explore more locations with more scientific payoff.

With heat-hardened landers and balloons to lift sample return vehicles high in the atmosphere before blasting into orbit, a similar strategy could even be used on Venus.

This really was the root cause of both the Challenger and Columbia disasters. I had already noted that this was normally missing in most of the public discourse on why the Shuttle should be replaced with something like the Constellation system. I had written this off as the fact that we as a nation find it hard to admit that we made some really bad mistakes.

I guess that I really didn't expect it to be missing from Fraser's and Pamela's discussion. Why was this?