[KillerGremlin]

Pretty shallow (and sad...damn you public education!) that a lot of you think nothing has been accomplished with the trips to the moon or space travel in the past 30 years. There has been a lot of medical research that has moved forward as well as progress made in the fields of physics.

The pro of this is we can see space move into the commercial sphere which means more funding which may ultimately be a good thing since commercial space means you'll have competition....Richard Branson and Virgin are already working on their thing. As I understand it, NASA is severely underfunded as is. Perhaps commercial space travel will give way to new innovation or different solutions.

On the other hand, going commercial means you might lose out on a wealth of valuable scholarly research. And yeah, colonizing the moon is hugely important since it is the first step to sending astronauts to other locations in our galaxy. Living in space for long periods of time may have consequences that we cannot yet surmise just from the astronauts who spend extensive time in low-orbit in the space station.

So much research to be done....this is a real shame. The real shame is humanity needs to fund several wars instead of making some real progress for the future of our species.