Quote from: Cvalda on Mar 06, 2012, 12:31:18 AM
Not really.
Yes. Really. There have been dozens of manned and unmanned pet projects coming into fruition in the last ten years. Corporations are talking about their own private fleets for tourism and business. Talks of private citizens going into space. There are even many people hitting the high side of forty working together to be the first to colonize Mars if and when that mission begins. Their goal is to spend the rest of their lives on Mars, paving the way as proverbial Johnny Appleseed's for the next generation of human beings to live on Mars.
There are plans, and where NASA is starting to fade, others
are looking to the sky. China and Russia are
very interested in space, and though nothing is yet concrete, they are planning things. Other, smaller nations have been planning various unmanned and manned missions back to the moon and mars for the last fifteen years. Just because it's not happening "yet" does not mean we won't see a huge BOOM within the next
half a century. An awful lot can, and does, happen in half a century.