>>13606419>>13606427I think you're overdramatic. During the Cold War the future of spaceflight relied on the successes of both parties, USA and USSR. For most of the time, there were going toe to toe, until the Moon landing. That one event halted the progress of human spaceflight because Soviets couldn't keep up, it was too expensive for them and if that wasn't bad enough, later they got baited with the Shuttle and dumped their money to make a useless copy that only flown once. The open secret is politicians don't care about space, but for obvious reasons you won't hear that from NASA employees.
From my point of view, the future is bright. Whether it was Musk who created the momentum and inspired people, or earlier Bush that started and promoted commercial participation in spaceflight, we have seeds of space economy. Companies like SpaceX, Virgin Orbit or Rocket Lab allow people to send their own equipment to space for the lowest prices ever in history of spaceflight, and they'll continue to go down because you won't have cursed programs like STS any more. In before no, I didn't forget about SLS but it's dead on arrival, it'll serve no purpose apart from getting people to Gateway (for a limited time) and maybe sending modules there, everybody is going to choose either Starship, Falcon 9/Heavy, Vulcan or whenever it comes, New Glenn to send their stuff. Even the Artemis program doesn't fully really on SLS, you have commercial lander, LETS, whole CLPS program that is as well launched on commercial rockets.
All of that with 0.48% of federal budget.
And then there's also Axiom space station. This one is a real sign of that beginning of space economy.
My one concern is greed of certain people, and crab bucket mentality created by them. You have politicians that only care about seats...sorry, I mean jobs, and because their actions are harmful to the spaceflight,also people like Bezos that can't handle defeat and will do everything to again, harm competition=spaceflight.
