Rich Lowry says that it's time to retire the Shuttle. He doesn't really say anything new. Or wrong, as far as it goes.

But he hurts his case (at least with me) by citing Gregg Easterbrook. And there seems to be no recognition in his post of the potential for any non-NASA space activities, though it's not possible to come up with any kind of sensible policy prescriptions without such a recognition. I also find it frustrating that these calls for ending the program are for the wrong reasons, when the best reason is (and always has been) that the program is a ghastly failure from the standpoint of cost and making spaceflight routine, which was its original goal.

I find his article much more reality oriented than the Derb piece a month or so ago. At least he isn't condemning human spaceflight as a whole based on the shuttle.

I don't think Derb was condemning human spaceflight based on the shuttle, but he did have some very dubious arguments (the astatine analogy was particularly dim.) If you view that piece as a rant it makes more sense.

Actually, I think Derb did drink the koolaid of "robots are better than humans" in his screed. He also suggested at one point, in the NRO Corner, that the annual cost of the shuttle program was sixteen billion a year and had to retract that later. Rather hurts his credibility.