This reeks of salary negotiation. We’ve seen this many times over on the Simpsons. They’re not gonna move forward without DeMaggio. Not if they don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with the fans.

Thank you. I've always been a Fryrish partisan. 

You didn’t like Lethal Inspection or The Late Philip J Fry?

Is this being written by the original writers, the tv movie writers, the revival writers or some hideous team of inhuman monster writers created from scraps of DNA from all of the above?

I still haven’t recovered from the “Susan Boil” episode. That joke was so awful that it made me create an AV Club account afterwards. I’m terrified that the inevitable COVID joke will make me join Instagram or something. 

Frankly, I’m shocked that the reception here has been mostly negative—-even if you didn’t like how the show wound down in the final season(s), its been 9 years, people. Maybe if it was just last year that the last new episode had occurred, I’d be concerned that they were out of ideas, but when nearly a decade has…

The continuations were a thoroughly mixed bag, so I’m not entirely convinced we need more, and without DiMaggio? Forget it.

Thank you.

Well we will agree to disagree than. Nobody said the Shuttle did not do some good things, and was not a national source of pride. But it failed on delivering what was promised. This is fact. And its high cost kept us from doing other things.

‘Still, perhaps the Shuttle’s retirement was premature as it came once we finally learned how to confidently operate the complex system in a safe manner.’

Well we pretty much knew where we stood by the late 1980s. Regardless, we need to learn from this, not live in denial because it makes us feel nostalgic. It is not like I am the only person who has this same POV, but it is fairly common among the scientific and space community. That is unless you made a check from the…

Yes I am aware on NASA’s current programs. This is not a response to my post.

I feel like I told a ton of kids Santa Clause is bullshit

I love the space shuttle and it’s neat as hell but you’re right. Gotta call a spade a spade. Emotional love for a neat spacecraft != best program for the $. The fact that the last test of the Orion got a [potentially crewed] craft further into space than we’ve been since the Apollo era is all you need to know.

And those would not have been made with another vehicle, or say actual human exploration of our solar system? Then why don’t we build another Shuttle?

I think the argument isn’t that the shuttle didn’t accomplish anything; but rather, that a differently designed space vehicle, or even standard non-reusable rockets, could have accomplished even more, or at least could have done the same things on a smaller budget (hopefully leaving NASA with more funds for other…

I grew up a few miles from the Final Assembly Plant (42) in Palmdale literally watching them build the ships. My mom was on the Shuttle team from day 1 until she retired in 1989. No one is more of a Shuttle fanboi than I am. That said, it absolutely was a compromise. Was it a terrible one that set us back decades? No,…

That’s because the ISS was designed for the Shuttle. Many of the launches of modules were from expendable launchers. It would be possible to design a high-capability space station based on expendable launchers, and the launch costs would have been less.

Yep. At $1.5B/launch, the hubble servicing missions could’ve literally launched entirely new hubbles on expendable launchers.

Funny - its much more capable successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is getting launched without a Shuttle. And KH-11 satellites, which are similar to Hubble, were launched on expendable vehicles. The Shuttle was not a necessary enabler for Hubble. And although it permitted its repair and upgrade, you could have…