Re: This is proper engineering
Not to dismiss this accomplishment, but we haven't had a man outside Earth's gravity well for over four decades now which is pretty sad considering how fast things were moving in the 60s.
Do you happen to remember the size of NASA's budget in the 1960s? It was 3-4% of GDP during the Apollo programme and has been less than 1% for most of the time since. And the Apollo programme had pretty much only one aim: get a man on the moon. NASA has since had to spread the cash around: space shuttle, space stations, Hubble, etc.
Even then manned spaceflight took up a disproportionate part of the budget as launching people means launching bigger spacecraft to accommodate them and the life support systems. So, the space shuttle continued to divert resources away from research throughout. But it's okay, because the budget has been cut since it was retired.
Of course, once in orbit you can go pretty much anywhere, as the Voyager probes have amply demonstrated. But it's a matter of diminishing returns for various reasons: firstly, it takes a very long time to get anywhere; secondly, even when you do get somewhere, Shannon's law and power supplies severely limit how much research can be done and how much data can be communicated; thirdly, space is a very hostile environment viz. the number of failed launches or deployments (Venus and Mars have been particularly cruel). The last is one of the reasons why older but more reliable computer hardware is used. Missions routinely launch with technology which was outdated at launch, but can reasonably be expected to still be working at the end of the mission. I remember hardware from the early 1990s and it was not particularly fast. We all have mobile phones with more oomph.
So, given everything stacked against it, I think space exploration continues to make extraordinary strides. Rosetta, this probe and, Spirt, Opportunity and Curiosity continue to impress.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
