As a heavy lift vehicle, it was far too expensive. As a crew-lift vehicle, it was far too dangerous. As a relaunchable space platform, it was all around unsuitable. Technologically, it was something of a marvel, but it cost literally ten times as much as it should have and put the astronauts in grave danger (as we saw at least twice) because of the unremitting stress it put on the engineers and the crew.

There were easily a half-dozen ways we might have gone in the early 1970s that would have (a) extended our moon program to a permanent habitat, (b) created a low-orbit space station that we could have established a long-term space presence and an honest-to-goodness Skylab rather than the temporary platform we orbited for a few years, (c) created a low-cost low-earth orbit launch facility (probably to aid in option b), or (d) funded a real heavy-lift program that could have been the backbone for deep-space missions such as a Mars mission, a back-to-the-moon option, a planetary exploration program, or pretty much anything else. And any of these programs would have cost LESS than the space shuttle and would have yielded MORE scientific, engineering, and economic return.

Instead, as always -- ALWAYS -- happens, politics intervened:

- The engineers and scientists refused to agree on one best platform, instead squabbling for their own areas of interest.

-The politicians were far more interested in sourcing the shuttle parts to their own state than in streamlining costs (which was one of the main reasons we ended up with the space shuttle -- it was easy to apportion the sourcing of parts to various voting districts).

-The leadership at NASA was somewhat weak, and to be fair, they were not in a position to make hard decisions, only to go begging to Congress (see previous point).

And so we ended up with the space shuttle, a patchwork of compromise, and the only platform under consideration that everyone agreed was the worst possible choice. But since they could not agree on a better one, it was the default, and that is what we got. It cost the space program fifty years of development; consider that today, almost fifty years after Apollo 11, we literally lack the engineering know-how to get to the moon and, unbelievably, have thrown out our engineering blueprints from the 1960s. We could not reconstruct Apollo if we wanted to; we would have to go back to the drawing board.

Bottom line: We squandered the miracles of the 1960s in petty politics, and as a result we are no longer a spacefaring nation. We, the first and only nation to land men on the moon, cannot even launch them into low earth orbit any more.