NASA appears no longer to be shooting for the stars

I will draw this to a conclusion because you don't seem to have the wherewithal to recognize when somebody is agreeing with you and trying to help point out the flaws in your argument.

This thread is why NASA is not funded. Our discussion is an example of the political discourse at large.

You're mad about DoD and war spending. So when NASA comes up, you're loaded and ready for bear to protest the war. Hell, you'll talk at length about spending priorities -- all inside the DoD. Look how stupidly we spent that money!

But where's the emotion when it comes to NASA? Just a throw away war barb involving your feelings and that's it. I kept trying to bring it back to NASA pointing out how pointless this line of reasoning was. Next week it will be oil cleanup in the Gulf -- how can we spend $2 Billion on a bomber and not have solar power perfected? The week after it will be otters, or seals, or whatever. Whatever you want money to be spent on, it will be compared to Afghanistan and the waste going on there. It's a pattern of argument. Recognize the pattern.

There's no positive commitment to NASA -- it's all negative feelings towards defense spending. And negative feelings take people to the polls, not positive ones. This means it is in politicians best interests for you to continue feel angry about something, not happy about something -- as long as you're mad at somebody besides them. So you'll continue ranting against the war, and continue voting, and politicians will continue to get elected, and NASA will continue not to be funded.

Looking at it this way, it's in politicians best interests not to fund NASA, as they can always make the argument that war spending took the money NASA could have had. This lets them off the hook from making tough choices, keeps you mad both about NASA and DoD, and life goes on. All is good. After all, who are you going to vote out of office because NASA is not funded? NASA and all those four thousand other pet projects are just all so much background noise. Tomorrow you'll be bitching about some other expenditure -- and how the cost of a nuclear submarine would have paid for it long ago.

And space exploration deserves better than that.

I'm done here.

Not exactly right. A part of my point was more that the complexity and finickiness of the STS seem to be largely, though not completely, due to the procurement process and some peculiarities of the U.S. political structure. Parts for the STS are made everywhere by subcontractors, in order that politicians can bring jobs to their constituents, and then integrated. I think that's to what you were referring but misunderstood.

As to mission-critical parts, there is some leeway in the definition of the term that may explain the confusion. "Mission-critical" means, necessary for the survival of the crew and passengers. The "mission" is, get to the desired location if you can, but abort safely if you can't. For passenger planes, this means that if one engine goes out, the plan can land on the other one (or two or three). If the ailerons go out, the pilot can achieve roll control with rudder and throttle. If the INS goes out, the GPS can get you to a visual on a landing strip. In each of these cases, there is a single failure and nobody dies. Hence, these systems are not "mission-critical" where the "mission" is transporting crew and passengers without loss of life. That the plane goes somewhere specific is a fringe benefit, so to speak.

IIRC, the O-ring disaster had to do with the poor design and decision-making regarding temperature limits of the inadequate O-rings. Once hot combustion products get past an O-ring, there will be a failure. On a system where those hot gases can impinge on a fuel tank, there will be a catastrophic failure. On the STS, that makes those O-rings mission-critical.

Interestingly, some have said that the choice of Thiokol is the ultimate cause of that disaster, for precisely the reasons I talked about in my original comment. The SRBs reportedly had to be able to be shipped over the road from Thiokol's plant. In order to do so (instead of building a plant near the launch site), the boosters had to be segmented. Segments -> O-rings. That's pure rumor, afaik.