As many are talking about inspiration and inspirational goals, it may be worth risking a view on this from a more cultural perspective. Mars is really the "what

As many are talking about inspiration and inspirational goals, it may be worth risking a view on this from a more cultural perspective. Mars is really the "what's next?" to the Apollo program and how it shaped our cultural perspective on space activities. It's the same thing, scaled up in distance, size, journey time, complexity, number of fundamental problems – and a fundamental lack of ideas what to do there, as it's all about going there. However, there had been other visions of space. We do not have to go further than the mid-century kids room: tin toy flying saucers zipping around asteroids (possibly making a fortune from mining), tin can shaped rovers stomping over the Lunar surface on their telescopic legs – and where there's a Lunar rover with perspex windows and some business to go about, there's probably also a vision of Moon bases and space ports now long forgotten, as these have dropped out of the popular imaginary. In a sense, Mars may not be that high hanging motivational fruit, it may be even the end of space inspiration, just the thing we clung to as we ran out of visions for space.