Our future in space, stunted in its youth-because Americans, as a whole are pretty stupid. We went to the moon, in an aggressive fashion, and then pretty much stopped.
When I think about all the money that has been wasted on all the wars between 1972 and now-we could have gone to Mars 20 times, had a base on the moon, and a real space station-with gravity.
But we made other choices. Like tax cuts for gajillionaires-and tax breaks for corporations who send jobs overseas. Now, the best we can do is go to the ISS in a Russian rocket-if that does not disgust you-then you have a screw loose. But we found money to go bomb Libya though. ( Of and if you even say one one word about the health care bill-I’ll just zap your comment right there).
The Economist has a great pictorial about the future that might have been-had we not been so collectively stupid.
TODAY marks 50 years since Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space. The dizzying pace of developments in aerospace technology—just 58 years separated the Wright Brothers’ first demonstration of powered flight from Gagarin’s trip into orbit—inspired plenty of optimistic speculation about what humanity’s future as a space-faring species might look like. This slideshow takes a look back at a future that was thought, in some quarters at least, to be just around the corner, and compares it with the reality of space exploration half a century after Gagarin’s flight.