Well, since the government seems to have marginalized it, it’s good to see as a people we haven’t lost our interest and will to explore. At the same time, profiteering and the exploration of worlds beyond our own seem to be drastically at odds if for no other reason than the massive amounts of dollars necessary to fund it. Granted it’s not a whole lot different than funding ships across the ocean to find new lands and faster trade routes but the scale of this compared to the technical difficulty would seem significantly greater. Funding the search for the arctic passage involved using, for the most part, existing technologies and the assumption was, once it was discovered it wouldn’t take much more than what was already known to make use of it. Space exploration in itself is requiring the development completely new technologies and for corporations who’s goals are driven by profit this could be a very long term problem. But in the end, I guess I’m for it, anything that moves us forward into new unexplored frontiers can only serve to excite and inspire.