moon and mars - no manned missions for at least 20 years

[oddjob]

It really irks me that we had to start from almost nothing in the early 60's and develop everything within 10 years to get men on and off the moon. Now with all the intervening technological advances we are struggling to even service the international space station as the shuttle goes out of commission.

Perhaps the motivation for greatness has gone away, and instead of funding awesome innovation we are channeling huge sums of money, with no accountability, through Goldman Sachs Geithner to his corrupt banking buddies. That's just one area where the government has gone totally off the rails.

Anyway, the NASA budget exceeds all the rest of the worlds space budgets combined, so it's not like there isn't money there. It just seems we are lacking the will to be exceptional, lacking a vision to capture the publics imagination. I'd love to see Obama "do a Kennedy" in 2010 and commit to getting men to Mars and back by 2020. Or begin a new Manhattan scale project to harness fusion power and create a super clean energy source. Telling us make sure our tires are properly inflated just isn't cutting it as energy policy.

Let's roll.