> The heroic era spanned only eleven years (1961–72) compared to the shuttle’s thirty, with a much longer list of firsts, and this fact contains an important lesson about the history of American spaceflight as well. We did a lot in a very short span of time, and then we did a lot less for a lot longer. Soon, of course, we’ll be doing nothing at all.<p>Really? Nothing at all? And list of projects developing new hardware both for manned flights and for launching payloads isn't long enough?<p>> This is the paradox of growing up in the shuttle era: the vehicle is more complex and advanced, its reusability makes it much more cost-effective, and its versatility makes possible missions the Saturn V never could have accomplished, such as repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope and construction of the International Space Station.<p>Really? Saturn-V couldn't carry a mission to repair Hubble Space Telescope similar to Soyuz mission to repair Salyut-7? International Space Station couldn't be build using Atlas and Delta, Proton and Ariane alone - especially after Mir was built by Protons? You're kidding, right?
My favorite counterargument to moon conspiracists is the following: it was technically possible to fly to the Moon, and way easier to fly than to convince everybody without actually flying; so - why not to fly? Technical details of the Apollo project show, that it's not rocket science :) by today's standards at least, not so much. Meaningful application of known approaches, moderately conservative (say, F-1 parameters, except thrust, were well within known models proven already experimentally), with a lot of work... but not really magic, no more than you'd expect from a project of that size.
"This is the paradox of growing up in the shuttle era: the vehicle is more complex and advanced, its reusability makes it much more cost-effective [...]"<p>Um, what? Can anyone substantiate the claim that the shuttle was cost-effective?