[ceptimus]

It most likely won't happen though. There have been no manned missions beyond low earth orbit since December 19, 1972 - forty four years ago. During that time there have been numerous announcements about manned missions to the moon or mars - and all those programs have fizzled out.

There was a rerun of a 1984 Horizon program on BBC 4 last night. James Burke was reporting on the Apollo moon landings (which had begun fifteen years before and finished after just three years). And then the program went on to consider all the claims made for the upcoming new shuttle missions and the launching of the Space Station.

The optimists were explaining how the space station would operate commercially as it would be possible to manufacture special alloys and drugs in zero gravity that couldn't be made on Earth - and how the space station would be used to cheaply mend and resupply earth satellites rather than having the expense of launching new replacements. There was going to be a permanently manned moon base before 2000, and manned missions to Mars by about the same time.

The pessimists (realists) said that it would not be cheaper to make things in space than on earth for the foreseeable future and that it would always be cheaper to launch new satellites than retrieve or repair existing ones. They said that the shuttle was an engineering dead end and that almost any conceivable mission could be better and more cheaply carried out by robots than by manned space flights. They said that the only purpose of manned flights was to capture the public's interest - and that would only work when something new and dramatic was done. They said that a continuing presence of astronauts on a space station would not even be newsworthy after the first month or so.

And the pessimists were right. If we'd spent half the effort and money that we did on the shuttle and ISS programs on unmanned missions we could have achieved so very much more.