The demise of Constellation is not the death of a dream. It's just the end of an illusion.
From Henry Spencer
Sure, there were hopes that Constellation's systems could later be adapted to support more ambitious goals. But Apollo had those hopes, too. It didn't work in 1970, and it wasn't going to work in 2020.
Supplying fuel for a Mars expedition from the lunar surface is often suggested, but it's hard to make it pay off - Moon bases are expensive, and just buying more rockets to launch fuel from Earth is relatively cheap.
The communications delays between Earth and Mars can be half an hour or more, so the people on the ground can't participate minute by minute in Mars surface activities.
The Moon may not be quite as appealing as Mars, but it's still a complex and poorly understood world, with many questions still unanswered.
In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.
NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA's problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length.
Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn't going to be much like flying an airplane.
Since SpaceX's very beginnings, they have talked about recovering and reusing at least the first stages of their rockets.
The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch.
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