Shuttle Launch

[E30Kaiser]

Yes, but we had a decent program through the 70's, and then what? It's been 39 years since we did anything more than basic NEO activities. If we had kept up what we were doing, we could have been on Mars in the 90's, but instead, we chose to focus on Vietnam, and transitioned into an essentially worthless (in terms of space productivity progression) shuttle program that we are shutting down to replace with unmanned equipment. It's just a bad situation.

After watching the new Top Gear episode which talks about the moon rovers I started to think, in the future(possibly) students in space or on some other planet will be learning about the space program and wondering WTF happened for 50 years or more. It may very well be viewed as a human space exploration dark age of sorts.

It is truly sad when you think about it, and many people just don't give a crap. They don't understand that you most likely CAN'T solve many of the problems on Earth unless you either stop Human population growth, or expand the available resources to them by moving on to controlling more cosmic real-estate.