Bureaucracy and politics are a bitch. Lately there's been the JWST overruns which have been screwing over a lot of the NASA space science budget (it's probably

Bureaucracy and politics are a bitch. Lately there's been the JWST overruns which have been screwing over a lot of the NASA space science budget (it's probably worth it but damn it's inconvenient). But things are looking up and the biggest change is in launch costs. SpaceX thinks they'll be able to operate a reusable Falcon 9 for $5-7 million per launch. That seems crazy but if you look at the math it's pretty sound. That sort of change, with a first generation reusable vehicle even, will revolutionize spaceflight, especially unmanned space science missions. It'll make it possible to fund small space science missions using crowd funding. It'll open up interplanetary science missions to a huge number of colleges, universities and research organizations. A lot of the cost of space missions comes about due to the high cost of launch carrying through to every aspect of the mission (if the launch costs $200 million then you can't just launch a $1 million spacecraft, that's a waste, you also need to have a very high (say >90%) chance of mission success so you engineer accordingly). Within the next few decades there will be fleets upon fleets of science spacecraft looking at the stars and roaming about the Solar System.