For a while during my life I had this wonderful dream of fully restoring an old Cadillac convertible to use for all of my gallivanting. Well, I managed to find one in semi reasonable condition and its miles were still below what was once considered high.

Well, one thing led to another with this fine old beast, and it did drive like a dream, if your dream of driving was like floating on a pillow and never feeling the road, or bumps, or smaller cars, or friction in the movement of the steering wheel (I still like that stuff about old American cars) while also powering well into triple digits with a 501 cubic inch engine. (okay, i still like that too)

Anyway I did do a lot of work to this fine old car and spent a lot of money in the process. What I found however is that regardless what I did, and regardless how well I tried to maintain this vintage vehicle, the amount of money that I kept pouring into it kept climbing each year. And regardless how much I spent I still had to spend more. Of course I will admit to driving and enjoying it and not parking it at an auto show all weekend.

One day, while sitting down on a rainy Sunday afternoon with nothing to do, I was going through a parts catalog getting ready to spend some more money on my money pit project car. Anyway I had an epiphany as a nice brand spanking new Cadillac drove by the window in front of the kitchen table, I did not have a den then. "Man" I thought to myself, "I like the design of that new Fleetwood". "I surely do wish I could afford one of those". "Well, heck, like that will ever happen" I said to myself. (I didn't say heck either but you guys are trying to build a Cadillac standard board after all) Then under full the influence of the afore mentioned epiphany I grabbed the box of receipts (I used to be anal about receipts) that I had kept for all of the money I had spent on buying, repairing, and hiring repairs to bring the old car back up to standards and to keep it close to there afterwords. Plus I had updated everything that could be updated, within my limited means of course.

I added up all the receipts I had spent maintaining and using that old car, and I found, that had I put all of that money towards the purchase of a new beautiful Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham with all the modern technology and better quality materials, I could have afforded to buy a brand new Chevy Impala.

With the brand new car I would have had none of the headaches, better fuel efficiency, gobs more free time and twice the garage storage. So I did what any prudent American would do and I went out the following Monday and bought a Ford f250, and came home and parked it next to my old Cadillac.

Actually I didn't go buy anything, but the moral of the whole reply is that sometimes simply updating an older vehicle becomes pouring good money after bad. The Shuttle is useful as a big old Cadillac gallavanting around in near earth orbit and driving space station engineers back and forth, It is however very expensive and ungawdly time consuming to maintain. And it was never designed to do anything but carry men back and forth to near earth orbit with an occasional payload in its big trunk.

If we intend to go back to the moon and farther with manned vehicles we will need to have a better designed vehicle, with better materials and engineering and redesigned from the ground up using modern techniques.