The Moon
is a long term plan. It has to survive 3 more presidential terms and six more Congressional terms, according to the present schedule. If I said we're even money to have the initiative to actually complete the mission I'd be being optimistic. I'm sure we'll get Orion to the ISS, I'm not sure we can get back to the Moon.
You gotta walk before you can run, and with present technology (including our technology for organizing ourselves) getting to the Moon is a Big Thing. The technology and methods we used the first time are gone. Our ability to put things together to make it happen is worse, that's why it's taking us longer. We have weaker leadership, less ability to organize ourselves on the basis of ability rather than social directive, and the skills base is pretty strong but inexperienced in the development of new manned vehicles, so we're having to go stepwise.
Sending working robots to Mars is still a huge accomplishment. Mars missions I've contributed to are getting a batting average of success better than .500 now, finally. Sending people there is beyond our present ability. It'd take a long time, 20 years minimum, or a national/international push far larger than Apollo to get us there sooner and have some hope of success. When I even start to think of all the problems we have to solve for that my head spins.
Asteroids are interesting, but we're not ready to move them. Besides, with a public terrified of the idea of beaming solar power back from space there's no way they'd let you tinker with asteroid orbits near Earth.
As to the value of the Moon, dismissing it as "an airless rock" doesn't show a lot of knowledge about it, I'd have to say. Makes as much sense as people dismissing the whole space program back in the early 70's because all they noticed in any of the pictures coming back from our probes was craters, leading them to dismiss half the solar system as a bunch of worthless dead rocks.
We're in no position to start heading off to other star systems when we don't know jack about our own and can't reliably travel further than Earth orbit. If I'm lucky we'll have a second mission to Titan in my lifetime. If it happens, it may come at the cost of another in-depth look at the Jovian system. Today we still haven't even seen the entire surface of Mercury, our knowledge of the Kuiper belt is minimal at best and the Oort cloud is more conjecture than data. Heck, we still don't grok the Sun.
We've got some cool stuff coming down the pike, though. New space telescopes like the James Webb space telescope and the Herschel mission from Europe are going to teach us plenty about extrasolar systems without waiting on flight time. There seems to be solid support for a major and a big but not so major mission to interesting places in the outer solar system. We're going to keep plugging away at Mars, we're not only learning a lot there, but we're learning a lot about
how to learn a lot about other planets.
Give us a chance. It's happening. There is long term thinking going on, but it really can't guide policy much in a short-sighted political environment. The first real commercial ventures are just cutting their teeth. Hopefully we'll see them get a chance to prove themselves rather than see them strangled in the crib like the prior generation of such ventures. That's what will give a chance for some of our tech to get unlinked from politics, and hopefully provide some stability.
The ideas are there, but there's a lot of underpinning work that's got to happen first. Some of it is happening. At least we're working on new ways to get into space. That hasn't always been the case, and it can yet all be shut down. At any rate, take a look at what is going on an enjoy the ride. If you're not impressed by what we're doing, I suggest you need to learn more about what we're doing rather than discount it.
