It has frustrated me to no end that the space program was sidelined because that money could be better spent on social programs. When we walked on the moon, I believed by the time I was in my forties we’d be on Mars. Instead, I’m in my sixties and we can’t even get back to the moon.”
OMG , exactly what I have been saying for the last 15 years. I thought that by the year 2000 I would be staying in a Sheraton Moon planning my Mars vacation.
We are spoiled by computer technology. In that case, barrier after barrier on a logarithmic scale has been breached with ease - a hundred, a thousand, a BILLION times faster and smaller.
But power technology is more constrained, as witness cars, planes, and rockets. There’s no way around it. You just have to put out the required energy.
Of course, the processing and control revolution has been the principle impact on space exploration, as it has enabled very impressive robotic performance, which we did not imagine thirty years ago.
So why the retro yearning for human space travel ? It’s not gonna happen! As noted, we haven’t even gone back to the moon. On the Angstrom scale ( 10^-10) the moon is about an inch away from the earth, and Mars is variously 20 to 100 feet away, but it is its relative speed that makes the barrier, as you have to catch up to it to go there.
It just makes for an outrageously difficult journey for a life sustaining transport system.
I find it ironic that we have all this science news about AI superseding humans, even as we eschew the obvious realm for its proper preminence, i.e. space exploration.