business, just like GE, AT&T, GTE and Hughes Aircraft. You can join the global Intelsat consortium and make a hefty 14% regulated profit in the telecommunications business, year after year. You can do quite well by "space commerce," thank you very much, and thousands of people thrive today by commercializing space. But the Space Shuttle, with humans aboard, costs $30 million a day! There's nothing you can make or do on the Shuttle that will remotely repay that investment. After years of Shuttle flights, there is still not one single serious commercial industry anywhere whose business it is to rent workspace or make products or services on the Shuttle.

The era of manned spectaculars is visibly dying by inches. It's interesting to note that a quarter of the top and middle management of NASA, the heroes of Apollo and its stalwarts of tradition, are currently eligible for retirement. By the turn of the century, more than three-quarters of the old guard will be gone.

This grim and rather cynical recital may seem a dismal prospect for space enthusiasts, but the situation's not actually all that dismal at all. In the meantime, unmanned space development has quietly continued apace. It's a little known fact that America's *military* space budget today is *twice the size* of NASA's entire budget! This is the poorly publicized, hush-hush, national security budget for militarily vital technologies like America's "national technical means of verification," i.e. spy satellites. And then there are military navigational aids like Navstar, a relatively obscure but very impressive national asset. The much-promoted Strategic Defence Initiative is a Cold War boondoggle, and SDI is almost surely not long for this world, in either budgets or rhetoric -- but both Navstar and spy satellites have very promising futures, in and/or out of the military. They promise and deliver solid and useful achievements,