The whole thing could be salvaged, except that you'd use an expendable launch vehicle and you'd bet everything on one or two launches of that heavy-lift vehicle. It might take one to give yourself a little margin. With two heavy-lift vehicles everything would land in just two packages instead of six. But nobody's going to just give you a heavy-lift vehicle for free or for almost free. Wood and his colleagues had postulated, the heavy-lift rocket route looks costly and iffy.
Wood adds a sardonic note.
It's amazing how badly we fell off, and there's a very significant lesson for us as a people and maybe for the human race - namely, that when you fall back after putting a major technological milestone in place, history will say that your civilization was falling apart. You don't want to do that ever, because it's one of the harbingers of collapse. The whole operation is mismanaged, he continues, now back in a more comfortable groove as we start to pack up our gear and move to the library door. NASA has no charter, no direction and no real goals. Don't burn up astronauts, please.