Aside from the tragedy of lost lives, the last thing we need now is a set back in our space program. It's already a mess as it is. We landed on the moon six times during the Apollo program, the last being about 30 years ago. Then nothing since.

Thirty freaking years ago. Compared to today, the astronauts of 30 years ago were cave men, in terms of technology. And what do we have to show for it? No more manned planetary missions, and a rickety space station that has had its funding cut 20 times, until it's two tin cans strapped together. Imagine what we could be doing with THIRTY YEARS worth of technological improvement aimed at space travel.

Hell, we developed the Space Shuttle 20 years ago. Where's the innovation since then? Do we honestly need an enemy to motivate us to explore the cosmos? Will our space program sit in stasis until the Chinese land on the moon? Are we only capable of acting under competitive pressure? It's no wonder that we have an accident, we've been flying the same shuttles for years and years. You can retrofit and repair, but it's still an old shuttle, and we should be innovating and making new ones, not patching up something that we made a decade or more ago.

There are so many reasons for developing space travel. If nothing else, people should see that the "all our eggs in one basket" idea is dangerous as hell. A comet could come on a collision course with the earth, we'd have about four or five days warning, and then we'd be gone. All known life in the universe, extinguished. We regularly are missed by comets coming from behind the sun, where we can't see them. One day, it might not miss.

It's highly improbable that we're the only life out here, but it's possible. So in our infancy, we could be eliminated, and all life would cease. It's so tragically shortsighted that we get congressmen so focused on being re-elected that they pump every penny back to their own state, in order to ensure another election in 2 years. That's all that happens, over and over. Any space money is of course being taken from the programs that it "belongs to", or from school programs or the elderly. Never mind the fact that if we get hit by a comet, all the schoolchildren and elderly will be dead, too. It just makes me sick. Our race is incapable of working for its own best interest.

The moon is the closest and easiest target we have for practicing colonization. We should be experimenting and learning about what it takes to build a colony that can survive with as little outside influence as possible. We have an unusually large moon, many astronomers consider it to be almost a binary planet arrangement. It's our backyard. We need to get people living on the moon, we need to learn how to make the human body survive in little to no gravity, we need to learn how to make closed environments that can sustain themselves for huge amounts of time without supplies. The number of things we could use the moon to work on is limitless. Some of our best innovation comes when we strive toward the unknown.

But now, we'll put our space program on hold for who knows how long. And even when we start sending people up again, the program will limp along with not enough funding or ambition, as usual. We'll stay on our own planet, and worry about our petty day to day lives, and not enough of us will dream about going to the stars.