Now that no one pays any attention to his factually-challenged rantings against NMD, Ted Postol has turned his attentions to manned spaceflight.
NASA could send people and especially materials to the space station much more cheaply and safely using expendable launch vehicles like the ones that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon, Postol argues.
“It would be considerably less expensive and you could achieve the same objective,” said Postol, who also questions the need to send humans into space at all.
Hm. So, we should be using expendibles because they’re a cheaper way to get to where we shouldn’t be going in the first place? Man, if I didn’t already question Ted’s credibility, this would certainly give me pause. Rand Simberg has already skewered the “expendibles are cheaper” myth on numerous occasions (reusability itself isn’t the problem, it’s NASA’s idea of reusability that doesn’t work). And as for the other half of this cognitively dissonant view, well, let’s just say that the stated objectives of human spaceflight are mere fig-leaves to get budget for the real objective: humans in space.
A robot cannot be a human in space. Is that so hard to understand?