It’s amazing how inspired we can become from just watching the major developments in pretty much every area of research and development these days. It’s been a technology race for a couple of decades now, and we’re seeing stuff being built that we never thought would be possible. We have computers that are several thousand times faster than the first super computer, and that’s been done in just a 20 year period. It is surely amazing, and we have to stop for a second to really take it all in. I am sure that if we just try, there is no end to what we can think of and create that wasn’t even possible 5 years ago.
However, when it comes to space exploration, it seems like the pace has somewhat slowed down. There were a lot of promises and a boatload of optimism spread around the globe during the ’80s. Those promises kind of died off as soon as we stepped foot on the moon, or at least it seems like they did. NASA has always been a pioneer in space technology; however, they have gotten some heavy competition lately. Virgin Galactic is a great example of a privately funded project that is going to take ordinary people into space, only for a short time, yes, but it’s space nonetheless.
During the ’70s, NASA made some rather bold promises about the development of the human race, and how we would live in space colonies holding up to 10,000 people by the year 2000. As we all know, that didn’t really happen. There is a space station up there that is still being built, but that’s really just how far they’ve come so far. At most, there have been like 10 people up there at the same time. That’s about 1,000 times less people than predicted by NASA themselves. You have to admire their optimism in the ’70s, and I wish they would get those kahunas back so that we could once again see some major progress in the race to colonize other worlds.
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