The answer to the question is no

I hate to bring this up at a time our astronauts are about to embark on a mission where there is at least a one percent chance of sudden death -- but has there been a bigger bust in recent human history than space exploration?

I don't mean to suggest we haven't learned a great deal about the universe in the past 50 years. Unfortunately, beyond satisfying curiosities, nothing we've learned has anything to do the lives we live on planet earth.

You'd think they'd have found something useful up there; a new kind of water, a plant that doesn't need water, a strong but bendable iron substitute, a glowing rock that could be used in flashlights. Wasn't that the kind of stuff they were expecting to find? Or was this whole thing just a trillion dollar mountain climb?

Not even to say its been a waste of money. The resources we've poured into the space program have come back in the technologies behind satellites, personal computers and lasers, among other things. You could even argue the space program has been a fairly good investment, as medium-sized government programs go.

My hostility towards the act of space travel might stem from the Challenger disaster, which tragically played live in my (and many other) classroom due to the "Teacher in Space Project" NASA was initiating. Maybe if I was generation older and remembered the space race and the national pride of putting the "first man on the moon," I'd view space travel differently.

Actually, it was a cartoon originally created for the youth of the man-on-the-moon generation that set up my soaring on space exploration.

The Jetsons lived in outer-space, and had a flying saucer car and a robot maid. Progress towards these things seemed like a reasonable expectation for my lifetime.

Even though the last twenty odd years have been unprecedented in terms of technological innovation and discovery we are no closer to living in outer-space or owning flying cars than we were when I watched cartoons. (I'm still holding out for the robot maid)

Instead of bringing us to the universe, all this new technology has been focused on bringing the world to us. Go back fifty years and what scientist or science fiction writer would have predicted that was how it was going to play out?

This could be be a reflection of a unforeseen timidity in human nature. More likely it's because each more highly defined look we take into yonders the more we realize there isn't anything out there.