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Again, I agree completely. I still feel we can exploit the Moon, however, we have squandered 30 years even doing that.

I still am honored and humbled that I was able to work at JPL and "fly" interplanetary spacecraft.

think of the spin-offs, the big boost we'd enjoy in home hardware. All those little machines in hospital operating rooms could be retooled to go operating on the surface of another planet.

Agreed. Moore's Law dictates that robotic autonomous spacecraft are not only doable, but also imminently practical.

The thinking after Apollo 11 was that the program needed the public enthusiasm, the celebrity cult, of having astronauts as our surrogates. Add to that the apparent charisma of the Mercury astronauts in administration... That suited the astronauts just fine, of course, but that didn't explain why public interest dropped precipitously directly after the first moon landing.

Seemed to me that there was a lot of interest in that little probe to Mars last year. And all it really did--to the public-- was look at dirt. But the public liked it anyway. The novelty was being able to see and move. And the thought occurred to me--what if we had sent up a couple dozen of the things at once, to attempt to begin a visual grid of the planet? Now there's a project to excite. Heck, if we need to, why not design the thing to look like R2D2?

Whatever we could do now, anything of real lasting consequence in learning and exploration, is in danger as of this moment. It is going down that same stupid path.