astrotastic:

It’s time to change that.

Ranting below. 

This is one of the topics that is guaranteed to get a rage reaction from me. Shame on humanity. Shame on humanity for giving up. We developed the most powerful vehicle ever in the sixties and we haven’t come even close to replicating what the Saturn V did. The Apollo crew module computer had a fraction of the computing power of your goddamn cell phone and, despite all of the technological innovations of the last fifty years, we haven’t gone past fucking low-earth orbit. 

We should be on Mars now. We should already have figured out the technological applications needed to get there. The innovations from Mars missions should already be improving consumer technology, just like the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions did. 

Instead we got complacent. Instead we went to wars. Instead of ensuring humanity’s survival, we played the childish game that is politics. 

Instead, the once great organization that was NASA is struggling to breathe amid budget cut after budget cut and left with no clear goals and no purpose. 

We screwed up. We screwed up big.