From: TURTLE              
To: SNAKEBYTE           
Subject: NASA History   
Date & Time: 06/17/90 15:58:59
Message Number  5953

Speaking of politics, NASA, and the space shuttle: Are you familiar at
all with the Dyna-Soar project started by NASA in the early 50's? The
idea was to create a winged, single-stage-to-orbit, reusable vehicle
that could ferry large quantities into space and return by landing on
a conventional runway. The Dyna-Soar was part of a larger project that
had a timeline something like: early space stations by the end of the
60's, permanently manned space stations and a moon shot by the end of
the 70's, permanently manned moon bases by the 80's and 90's. The
vehicles themselves would probably have ended up smaller than the
current space shuttle, but they had a few advantages, like the fact
that they were supposed to have on-board air-breating jet engines so
they could land under power. The Dyna-Soar project was scrapped by
Kennedy's declaration that "we will land a man on the moon by the end of
the 60's." Well, we did, but I wonder what the world would be like now
if the original plan had been stuck to. (assuming, of course, that the
government could be persuaded to provide funding for that long, and that
it didn't fall into any of a number of various political sandtraps,
and so forth).
 
Now, of course, we have moon rocks embedded in Lucite and a Tinker Toy
space shuttle that just plain doesn't work as advertised, and
frequently doesn't work at all.