Gregg Easterbrook argues in Time that the shuttle program should be scrapped entirely. It’s a hundred times more expensive than it was supposed to be, it’s overbuilt for what it does, it’s unreliable, and it flies only a handful of missions a year (instead of the handful a month it was originally designed for).

He doubts the pork-barrel US Congress will scuttle the shuttle, but in its place he advocates a faster-better-cheaper approach to space flight that doesn’t send humans into space just so they can push a couple of buttons on an experiment and pose for the photo op.

I’d hate to see the shuttle go. But, frankly, it’s broken. Let’s use it while we’ve still got it, but we need real alternatives. Fortunately, there already are alternatives that could be a decade or less away—if the US will fund them.

(1) A “space plane” to replace the shuttle. When we really do need to place humans in orbit, we could use this baby. But NASA killed the project a few months ago, citing high costs. Could they have overbuilt this one too? Pare it back, NASA: think Cesna, not B-52.

(2) A rail gun. Just shoot that shit up there. A common technology in roller coasters, a large rail gun could launch satellites and supplies into orbit without the need for any rockets. As it now stands, rockets have to be able to carry their payloads but also their fuel, adding quite a bit of weight. If you just had to worry about the payload, the price per luanch could drop quite a bit. Plus, no pollution from burning rocket fuel. (Sorry, humans would be squashed in any rail gun launch.)

(3). Build a space elevator. It sounds pretty scifi, but if you could pull a goodly sized asteroid into orbit and spin it into a cable, you could cheaply and safely launch humans and supplies into orbit cheaply and continuously. There are three places in earth orbit where space elevators could sit without having to adjust for gravity—that seems like plenty of elevators to me. You can spin the cables down to the surface (preferably somewhere on the equator) or fly low orbit space plans up to the space elevator’s “hook.” Use some easy going rail guns to get it started, and magnets and gravity will do the rest of the work for you. Seems the best long-term solution to me.