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Although I love the history of manned spaceflight, I say, GOOD!!! And that goes for pie-in-the-sky manned missions to Mars too.
The 2009 fiscal year for the US saw a deficit of US$1.4 Trillion, 2010 will be US$1.5Trillion and the following year may be worse still. The US economy is gravely ill through 60 years of recklessness, and it won't repair anytime soon.
Countries like Italy have a debt of 110% GDP and Greece is near insolvent.
The climate issues are not going away, but are getting worse, and no individual country wants to lead the way. The cost of keeping carbon emissions under control, in keeping warming under control, would be to condem all developing countries to stay as developing countries and to scale back first world countries. Ask the Chin family in the outskirts of Beijing (which is already choking to death with pollution), what they think about that idea?!
The west has got itself in a gorilla war with terrorist cells that won't go away until there is retribution, and since the US are in economic trouble, this issue will only heat up.
Until a thousand issues like this are cleaned up and we all can play nicely, I say space can wait...perhaps until a more sensible generation appears.
I'm sure the next 5 generations will really appreciate a more sensible approach to what gets achieved over the next 50 years.
Just my 20c worth.
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