SHUTTLE DOWN: Six capabilities lost. And a final comment:
"[P]erhaps the greatest lesson of the shuttle for future spaceship designers and space exploration theorists: If you build a spacecraft, or any other machine, with a predetermined and limited set of capabilities (as NASA is now doing), you will usually get just those predictable capabilities and little more. You will not, as happened with the shuttle, learn to use it more and more efficiently and keep discovering new ways to do new things not even imagined when the vehicle was first conceived. These capabilities, in the case of the shuttle, turned out to be the only way to respond to many unexpected problems. And nobody should be surprised that the unexpected awaits us in outer space."