As the human race, our nations have built a many ground-based telescopes and a few space-based telescopes now in-orbit --- all looking about the universe providing knowledge as to the vast and unfathomable immensity of space. Yet as humans in the Age of Space, our footsteps have not yet left the Earth's gravity well of our own Moon and even then - that was decades ago. The human race appears too busy with wars, 'Cap and Trade,' and health care to explore and expand the human footprint beyond our figurative lunar front prorch.
As China's noted Ouyang Ziyuan, academician at China Academy of Sciences and chief scientist of China's moon exploration project, stated the past week: "the US' Project Apollo - which gathered around 400,000 people, about 20,000 firms and more than 200 universities - cost $25.6 billion. But it guided almost all the cutting-edge technologies in the 1960s and 70s, and has created an economic value amounting to 17 times the cost."
Netural public policy observers might realize the dividends that flow from exploration are great and solve many problems of the human race. Yet we seem to languish in "the backwash of space."
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