I’ve long considered manned space travel a dead-end. I suppose it comes from the fact that the Challenger disaster had burned itself into my memory as a child. I remember being stunned by the images coming back from the Voyagers at Jupiter and Saturn and getting my mind around the fact that those were whole other worlds. We could go such fascinating places with machines, but getting humans off the planet was obviously a costly, dangerous and futile proposition.
I could bolster that argument with the tragedies of Apollo 13, Skylab and recently, the shuttle Columbia. And for many years, I did.