40 years from now we might ruefully look back at the opportunity gone by, when humans could have ventured off the planet and to an evolution without limits. Instead we left it to our robots to give us virtual worlds - ones we created rather than discovered. If we still conceptualize about such things, we may realize that we lost the space race not to those dreaded Communists or any other foreigners, but to the robots that we created as our emissaries and then let replace us. Or 40 years from now we might ruefully look back at a time when space flight represented the best of humanity. We may see that all that has been replaced with humans in orbit as one more play area, banal searches for individual gratification where the rich shall inherit the space.
Humans relate to human space flight.
Through good times and bad, the symbol of the human adventurer representing us in space has stood for something far more than the goals of the individual flight. John Glenn was the most recent testimony to that. But NASA and the Congress, in this country and in their corresponding institutions abroad, are bogged down in minutia - like justifying how much a science experiment on the space station can tell us. The budget just submitted to Congress yesterday eliminates all work on the space station that might have led to humans leaving Earth orbit. The public does not have the same problem our leaders have - the public knows where human space flight should lead.