The so-called golden age of science fiction preceded the lunar program of the 60s, and that was an excellent source of free PR for the space program. While the internet gives the general public greater access to the actual science of space, I think it's telling that wizards and magic grab more attention from our children than astronauts and spaceships.

@Mike Johnson: Buzz Aldrin's spacesuit was not equipped with a camera like Neil Armstrong's spacesuit. Of course, Neil Armstrong has to be the most humble man ever to walk the Earth let alone the moon, so anybody is going to look vain by comparison.

"If we fall behind we'll be…..BEHIND!!"

Yes, thank you Mr. Buzz. Brilliant.

Sorry about that 'second man on the Moon thing.'

I believe I am a patriot. I love my country (the USA). But the Space Race of the 60's was wasteful and the Cold War of the last half of the 20th century held the world hostage to the two superpowers, ready to unlease Mutually Assured Destruction on the planet at a moment's notice. Going to the Moon was fun but it was a distraction from developing a permanent presence in Earth orbit. And I am so glad that the ISS is a world wide effort with many nations joining together.

Forget these mad competitions – it does not matter who is Number One but that humans learn to cooperate and help each other.

Let the USA join the community of nations inside of trying to dominate it. There is room for all.

If we could internationalize the space program in a truly meaningful way, for the long term, that would be the greatest achievement.

How can Humans in their right mind think of sending manned space crafts out of our Solar System. Why is NASA spending Trillions of dollars on developement of space stations and space crafts?

If the vision is to target space tourism and commercial ventures within our Solar System, maybe it makes sense.

But if the Human species would like to find a new home, before we run out of options on our present home, we better think out of the box.

The Human body is too fragile for space travel. We have to find some other revolutionary way forward if we want to save the Human species from extinction.

How about NASA inviting suggestions and proposals for a practicable and feasable alterantive to manned space travel on the lines of X-prize and stop spending money on traditional concepts of space travel by competing with China/ Russia.

Restarting lunar missions is critical if we want to have any chance at reaching mars in the near future.

Yes, 8,000 metric ton. The aircraft actually weighs well over 20,000 metric ton. The three world's largest runways will be built in Northern California, United Sates, Australia, and France.

The aircraft uses composite plasma-scramjet engine cluster and supersonic engines on collapsible wings. The supersonic engines are used for take-off, and at 1,400 miles per hour the plasma scramjet engines will be activated. Then at 1,800 miles per hour the supersonic engines are shutdown and the wings are closed into the aircraft for efficiency of aerodynamics at very high speeds. The aircrafts skin is being under research and will mostly likely be built of special nano-engineered carbon-carbon material to counteract plasma in the Earth's atmosphere at 18,000 miles per hour speeds. And so, yea, it does have a ability to go in space and even possibly land on the Moon and come back to Earth, granted we construct runway on the Moon which we are looking forward to.

We are working on a plan to deliver a runway on Mars to be able to land a Mars Spaceship.

This aircraft will open space to humanity. We have already have a long list of missions in various places through out the solar system and even an interstellar mission.

One of the extremely exciting things are that we are planning on to launch four reflecting telescopes each with 200 meter mirror.

Thanks.

Now how is this possible? Well, we are not going to be using the traditional rocket system, but rather an aircraft with plasma scramjet engine to reach orbital speeds to deliver the Mars Spaceship with in Earth orbit.

Look out for official announcements in 2009.

Summit Waterfalls is an American company and is soon to be incorporated.

I would worry more about Japan than Russia, although China is probably the US biggest concern as far as space goes.

Sorry to be a doom sayer but its just logistics

It's for the same reasons that all the manufacturing is now being done in China.
- they send all their brightest minds to universities in the United States without having to develop their own educational system, often on free scholarships
- they hack into our computer systems, and through other means of espionage, steal our newest technology for free
- they pay their labor force, from the laborers who build the space facilities all the way up to the scientists who operate them, 10 pounds of rice a month as salary.
- they have no armies of environmental lawyers delaying construction of their space facilities to protect the habitat of the purple-leafed ground lousewort
- there are no governmentally decreed regulations concerning safety, diversity, gender norming, nor other labor laws that add billions to our costs
- they have no unions to drive up wages and protect the incompetent
- no layers of political oversight, wrangling over budgets and priorities
- no politically motivated sideshows, like James Hansen, to eat up the budget
- and lastly, and maybe most importantly, they have absolutely no concern for human life, so they need not put in the layers of redundancy in the equipment and space vehicles to protect their astronauts. With 1.5 billion of them, why worry about losing 10 or 20? They'll just send some more over here to get trained for free.

All the above reduce their cost to nothing relative to our own, eliminate expensive delays, and allow them to develop their programs at breakneck speed, with no regard for the environment or their own people.

I recall a thread here recently about the possibility of a one-way trip to Mars, and how much faster that program could proceed if we tried that. The outrage from many of the posters about how could we ever ask someone to do that was very enlightening. Over there, they'll just order someone to go.

They could lose the first twenty ships and a hundred astronauts without blinking an eye. The Russians lost many cosmonauts that we never heard about in the US during the height of the US-Soviet space race. Heck, due to the secrecy we would only hear about the Chinese astronauts that lived.

And they'd still beat us to Mars because of our squeamishness at ever, ever losing another Sally Ride.

http://www.directlauncher.com/

DIRECT 2.0