Looks aside, NASA’s Orion is “lightyears ahead of what they had in Apollo”

Redundancy is key to travel "farther away than any human spacecraft has ever been.”

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[Lee L]

LordFrith[/url]":27ibwjqi]It's interesting to me that the key point mentioned many times was "safety." To me, this is a problem.

If safety is your primary concern, the safest thing you can do is simply not launch -- think of the money you would also save.

If it really is important to put people somewhere else, there must be a value of doing it -- the fact that we are so worried about safety that we are putting a huge amount of effort into a system to reduce the danger as much as possible likely means that the reward of space travel isn't seen as that large. If the reward is small, why make the risk high?

Also, with a focus on safety, are astronauts doing anything heroic or brave, or are they just spam-in-a-can? Thus, are they actually proving to be role models for the next generation of scientists and engineers?

I think I'd be happier with a cut-down fast paced program with an increased chance of astronaut death with a faster development cycle.

As a society, we have fallen into the "if any small reduction in risk or death is possible we should do it at all costs" mentality over the last couple decades. So many things we do are designed with that philosophy and made things worse in many ways, IMO.