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Back in the early ‘60’s I worked on RFI problems for a Secret Squirrel project called Dyna-Soar. The idea was that a rocket-powered airplane could be launched from a first stage rocket booster, then coast like a ballistic missile till it reentered the atmosphere to drop a bomb on, say, Moscow or maybe Tehran. Actually, the Nazis just before 1945 had come up with the idea and our German scientists convinced our military to fund the idea after the war.

In 1963 a miserly Luddite from a GM automobile factory canceled the project after the final design review just before the prototype was finished. He figured it would be cheaper to just put a bomb on the nose of the booster. The rocket already had fins on the fenders, so what was to be gained by the project? What escaped him was all the other things you could do with a reusable, manned satellite.

They started over in 1975 and designed and built a Dyna-Soar, the Shuttle, that wasn’t even a bomber, to do many of the things that could have started 12 years earlier. Based on this device, men were able to go to the Moon. That may be a useless trip unless it turns out that the Moon’s surface is rich in Tritium implanted by the solar wind. If this is so, then the energy future of mankind may be dependent on a British process that uses Tritium to make a controlled fusion reactor and by mining the Moon’s crop.

However, now to save money a Luddite has scuttled the shuttle. Although a community organizer from Chicago, not a GM poobah, he has managed to give much more to the car companies than he will save. The car companies, of course, put more fins, more weight and more powerful engines on their cars. I mean, who wants a car that can’t haul the entire football team to the hot dog emporium, can’t accelerate to 60 in two seconds and can’t top 120 miles per hour. Gasoline is cheap, right?

Maybe canceling the shuttle program isn’t such a bad idea. In 2004 Burt Rutan won $10 million dollars by putting a man into space twice. His important contribution wasn’t the spaceship -- it wasn’t using the Dyna-Soar technique. It was putting the spaceship on an airplane (the White Knight). In a few years if it hasn’t been done already from Area 51 we should be able to launch a shuttle from 20 miles at three or so times the speed of sound. The spaceship can just loaf into orbit and the airplane can return to the airport. The cost of a seat on a flight to a space station, for which the Russians want to charge 20 to 35 million dollars, would be more like first-class airfare -- $2,400 to fly from New York to Berlin.

By the way, I don’t see the big deal about going to Mars. Aside from a publicity stunt I can’t figure what is to be gained. We work our butts off getting out of the big gravity hole in which we live, then climb right back into a deep gravity hole. Why not go to a few asteroids? I’d be willing to bet that the biggest gold nugget we’ve ever seen is floating around between Mars and Jupiter.

We tried building a civilian rocket, Nova, to be politically correct, but it wasn’t technically correct. By the time we launched our first satellite using our existing military rockets, we found Sputnik waiting for us. Then we tried making space safe for school teachers before putting up a space station and found the Russians in their space station waiting for us. Now we are dumping the shuttle and will probably find the Chinese waiting for us if we go back to the Moon.

Didn’t our politicians ever hear of Ferdinand and Isabella? Because they bit the bullet and spent money, small potatoes in fact, on a trip to the American Continent, the peons in Spain were in better shape than the peasants in Ireland. I’d be willing to bet the farm that the country that first explores space will be the richest country in the world for the succeeding century, not in spite of investing in space travel but because they invested in space travel.