Since everything regarding space is so frickin’ expensive (launch, engineering, software, manpower, training, materials...), the opportunity costs are simply too high for the expected short- to mid-term returns. You may ask yourself: what about the Apollo-Program? The 60`s spacerace was approved by politicians for signaling-purposes in competition with the USSR; such an external factor is currently absent. With that said,on an optimistic note: a lot of people have held onto the dream of the final frontier and are exploring possibilities to reduce esp. the launch cost, eg. by starting rockets from flying boeings.
That explains the cuts in funding, but not why there is so much attention given to what still exist. This rover to Mars seems an impressive thing, and yet, before reading about it on Slashdot, I never got any information about it. Not a line (that I saw, at least) in mainstream newspapers or TV news, nothing.
Since everything regarding space is so frickin’ expensive (launch, engineering, software, manpower, training, materials...), the opportunity costs are simply too high for the expected short- to mid-term returns. You may ask yourself: what about the Apollo-Program? The 60`s spacerace was approved by politicians for signaling-purposes in competition with the USSR; such an external factor is currently absent.
With that said,on an optimistic note: a lot of people have held onto the dream of the final frontier and are exploring possibilities to reduce esp. the launch cost, eg. by starting rockets from flying boeings.
That explains the cuts in funding, but not why there is so much attention given to what still exist. This rover to Mars seems an impressive thing, and yet, before reading about it on Slashdot, I never got any information about it. Not a line (that I saw, at least) in mainstream newspapers or TV news, nothing.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/rss/podfeed-hd.xml