Airliners.net

We've all had our two cents worth in other discussions, now go wild!

What would you *love* to see in human space travel in the next 20, 50 and 100 years?

Lets keep it vaguely plausable, but beyond that....

A moon base and manned missions to Mars would do me nicely. I'll believe them when I see them, though - too many future elections to make them certainties.

Decent images of a habitable planet in another system would be cool but... within my lifetime? I'm not going to hold my breath.

Hell, I'd like to see a coherent policy come out of NASA.

In order of preference:

1. Send Bush to the ISS.
2. Decommission and abandon the ISS, (leave Bush there), it's a money drain.
3. Permanent presence on the moon prior to 2020.
4. First human on Mars-2020.
5. Manned exploration of the solar system from 2020 onwards.

America and the Apollo program showed the world what a committed nation could accomplish. Our present space exploration program is a sad sack of shit without national leadership, vision, or clearly defined goals. That being said, there is clearly outstanding science being performed, but I fear my country is waning, when somebody looting beer after a hurricane is more news worthy then two robot rovers on the surface of Mars, well, you can dismiss this culture as reaching it's end.

Permanent moon base is what I would like to see in the next 10 years.
There we can test alot of techniques such as setting up buildings for living that can be used on Mars. It's relatively close so in an emergency our astronauts arn't far from home and it would be easy to resupply. I think a permanent moon base is a logical first step to going to Mars.

myself in a spacesuit, doing a spacewalk, looking at the stars

I wouldn't mind seeing a space station that isn't so costly.

It's draining money so fast and I really haven't heard much about any breakthroughs, experiments, etc that proves it should really be up there.

All I want right now is $20,000,000USD to hang out on the ISS for a week.