...about space exploration

Yesterday, NASA posted this image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity of a Martian dust devil:



(Image courtesy NASA/JPL. Original photo.)

While dust devils on Mars have been photographed before, this has to be one of the best I've seen.

However, the quality of the photo isn't the point. The point is the fact that it exists in the first place. We (meaning humans) have placed vehicles on Mars. That's an amazing accomplishment. Just think—100 years ago, Robert H. Goddard (wiki) set the wheels in motion for spaceflight as we know it today. On top of that, it hadn't been that long since the first powered airplane flights.

It's exciting. We put a probe on Titan, there's currently one on a comet (ESA's Rosetta mission), and we now have the most detailed photos of Pluto ever.

But here's the thing. If, like me, you've watched the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, you know the direction in which our space program was supposed to go. Or at least a very optimistic version of the future at the time. When the film was released in 1968, NASA's funding was at (if you'll forgive the pun) astronomical levels. So, if NASA funding had stayed at those levels, we'd probably have a colony on Mars by now. Well, maybe not, but you get my point.

I've always been interested in space/astronomy. I'm excited by the work that Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Jeff Bezos (Amazon/Blue Origin), and Elon Musk (PayPal/Tesla/SpaceX) to make spaceflight less expensive and perhaps open space to tourism. I'm excited by NASA's next-generation launch system, the SLS/Orion platform, which will carry payloads and astronauts to deep space beyond the Moon. But that doesn't really start until at least 2020, with a mission to Mars happening somewhere in the 2030s.

There's a long way to go, but I'm astounded by how far we've already come.