To Date

 As always, click for big. This is, in the new, hip style, an infographic of every mission beyond Earth. You can see where we (humanity, meaning mostly the USA, USSR, and the EU) have collectively put our priorities, to date. My big takeaway is look how few missions to Saturn there have been, and yet one of them - Cassini - is incredible beyond belief. And still going!

Fret plenty, however, since as Russia has taken a nosedive, and America's looking to do the same, who knows how many future missions to space at all lie in our collective future. I fear perhaps we are on the edge of a rollback of human progress. Maybe China will save us all. Maybe not.

But, let us not worry about that now. Instead, behold, every single human rocket:

While impressive, collectively and each in their own way (think of the effort that went into every one), it's also mildly depressing. It takes so much effort to simply go the 60 or so miles (straight up) to get to the very edge of space. Alas! Such is the reality of living at the bottom of a gravity well.

And perhaps there's more hope for our future than I admit, at the moment. Private enterprise is blazing paths governments feared to tread. If the profit is there, and our infrastructure on Earth stays relatively stable, we might still have our space mining, asteroid living future. But then, it will be profit driven, and no doubt that asteroid will be owned by Yoyodyne or some such, and all the folks involved will be playing according to their dime. Which can be summarized in the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, and not in any kind of Utopian Trek "What's money, man?" Directive. And so we'll simply export our Dystopia to space.

Alas!