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BTW, before you go tugging on Burt's cape, you better check his record of success verses the bureaucrats at NASA. Burt has designed, built, certified and flown more aircraft than most of the NASA bureaucrats have ever seen. And his safety record is a lot better than NASA's.

I would beg to differ with that. NASA built more X-planes than Burt ever scribbled down on paper. The safety record is apples and oranges. Kudos to Burt for his successes, but they are not comparable to NASA's achievements.

I was speaking specifically about any single current NASA bureaucrat. If you compare an individual engineer to a whole government agency over its entire existence, you are the one comparing apples to oranges.

BTW, most of the x-planes were designed and built by contractors not civil servants. And most of the x-planes were flown by the Air Force not NASA. But why should I get in the way of your love affair with NASA's inflated ego. I bet you think NASA invented Tang and Velcro as well.

How can anyone who claims to be an engineer discout the tremendous technical feat of going from 0 to the moon in less than a decade?

It's unbelievable!

How can anyone not be filled with deep respect and awe when one considers that those men crossed a gap of 239,000 miles in a machine that was designed using the best technology available 37 years ago, walked on another world, planted the flag of the United States, left scientific instruments that are still being used to this day, and returned safely? There is no chance that we could repeat that feat in five years, even given our unutterably massive technological advantage. On the current schedule, we hope to go back to the moon on a schedule with a timescale similar to that of Apollo, with much more ambitious goals on what is essentially a shoestring compared to what this nation invested in Apollo.

Were there mistakes and problems in our first journey to the moon? Sure. That's only to be expected in such a vast undertaking, one that is still unique in human history. That's why the first astronauts were test pilots, men who were unafraid to risk their lives.

Someone who would so easily dismiss that achievement on account of Apollo 1 and 13 could only be a person who really doesn't know what they are talking about, even if they mean well.