  NASA at 50  Many happy returns?  America's space agency has
reached middle age. Will it now recapture the glory of its
youth, or dwindle into decrepitude?  See article  Readers'
comments    Hopefully, NASA's already doing this. Just in case .
. .I can suggest one NASA mission no one would miss--spaceship
building. Instead of design and building all of its spacecraft
in-house, like they did with Apollo and the Shuttle, ask for
bids from private companies for craft with the needed abilities
for different missions. At most, NASA should just be
experimenting with untested and too-advanced-for-prime-time
technologies and techniques.   Though an avid reader of the
Economist and someone who agrees with many of it's points of
view, I disagree with the Economist's stance on space travel. My
question is - what is the point of knowing about the planets
through robotic exploration if we never really intend to do
anything useful with that data? In other words, what is the
point of just knowing? Our space programs should