Lots of interesting discussion here about space exploration, but I'd like to add a personal note. I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, during the 60s, NASA's glory

Lots of interesting discussion here about space exploration, but I'd like to add a personal note. I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, during the 60s, NASA's glory years. Huntsville is home to Marshall Space Flight Center, where my father, an electrical engineer, worked as a contractor, with Chrysler. He worked on parts of the Saturn V and, I think, Gemini. When the Apollo program shut down and NASA had to retrench, he was laid off at about age 50, along with many other scientists and engineers. Huntsville imploded. Some of the unemployed started high-tech companies, some found jobs elsewhere, many left aerospace entirely. Chrysler moved some operations there, but nothing was available for my father. Fortunately, he heard through a friend of a job at Goddard Space Flight Center, in Maryland. He got the job and we moved, taking a loss on the house we'd owned for twelve years. He spent the last 17 years of his career at Goddard. Aside from the bigger issues of Humanity's Destiny in Space, the end of Apollo had significant human costs and changed many lives, including mine. I work at Goddard now and have spent over twenty years of my career here. That probably wouldn't have happened had we not moved to Maryland in 1971, when Apollo ended.