"Put down that wrench!"

I've spent much of the last month reading through plans for missions that never were on the NASA Tech Report server (see the links for John above) - plans to put a man on Mars in the mid 1980s (with nuclear thermal rockets) that were written before Apollo 11 landed in the Sea of Tranquility.

Consequently, I'm now incredibly depressed by the current state of the US space effort, and by what are effectively three wasted decades of manned spaceflight.