Fifty years after the first man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and the first orbital spaceflight, US astronaut John Glenn, many are asking: "What's next for mankind in space?" In five decades of incredible discovery, we've sent man to the Moon and now have a handful of spacemen living on the International Space Station, orbiting 200 miles over our heads. Our technological prowess seems to know no bounds and we have the ability to mount a deep-space manned mission right now.
But for many, the advances aren't happening fast enough - shouldn't we have a base on the moon by now? That was, after all, the logical step after the Kennedy administration set the task to race the Soviets to the lunar surface in the 1960's. Why haven't we sent a man to Mars yet? It seems puzzling that the majority of robotic missions we send to the Red Planet have a component intended to reconnoiter for a "future" manned mission that never seems to come.
It may seem a shame, then, that we know we can live in space, we know that we send robotic probes to any corner of our Solar System, and yet since the trailblazing Apollo Era of the late 60s and early 70s, no human has ventured beyond low-Earth orbit. Perhaps our evolution into a true space faring species will take longer than a few decades; or even centuries? Let's just hope we don't destroy ourselves through war or ecological decimation before our stellar dreams become a reality.
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