It’s safe to say that nobody cares about space anymore. Can you blame us? Years worth of budget cuts and NASA’s ½ a-penny-on-the-tax-dollar budget cuts have made our foray into spacy very…limited, to say the least.

While our telescopes are picking up signs of new black holes forming in our galaxy, NASA is expecting the American people to be wowed by high-definition pictures of rocks. Awesome.

What burns me up the most is how any discussion of manned flights to anywhere besides our multi-billion dollar orbital tree house is always taken with a grain of salt.

Intergalactic travel seems like more of a pipe dream than the future. If you’re keeping track, it’s been decades since we put a man on the moon and we still don’t have moon colonies or even solid plans to develop any moon colonies. We’re stuck at home on spring break while our robotic friends upload pictures of their trip abroad. This sucks.

I will give NASA credit in one aspect of the latest rover landing; they have hyped the hell out of this latest venture. I’ve seen more than three updates since the initial landing that have had the words “shiny rock” in the title. If NASA isn’t genuinely wetting itself over each pebble the rover comes across on Mars the organization isn’t letting it show. I mean, if anybody were going to get that excited over Mars rocks I’d guess it would be them, right?

Here’s the bottom line: the projects would probably get a bit more fanfare and public support if they were new and exciting. That isn’t to say that the Curiosity Rover isn’t finding out new information on the red planet – it’s just that it’s not as cool as real, actual humans finding out said new information on the red planet.

In the end, I really just want a future I can look forward to. I want companies to start marketing their products as the “the _____ of the future” again. I want to believe that my species can achieve more than devouring the resources of its home planet. I want a true glimpse into the future of space travel, and exploration.
You can keep the rocks, thanks.
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