"space exploration is often seen as a waste of money with no real benefits"

Science Inspired by the Republic of the Moon exhibition at FACT Liverpool, C. James Fagan writing for Liverpool's new culture blog The Double Negative ponders why we've lost the drive to return to our nearest celestial neighbour:

"There’s no real political drive; space exploration is often seen as a waste of money with no real benefits (though it’s much cheaper than a war). Perhaps there’s something darker in the human psyche holding us back. As much as we need to expand to explore and evolve, we need to avoid dangers to survive. The effects of this contradiction, the comedown from the Space Race as it where, are explored by J.G Ballard in his short story collection ‘Memories of the Space Age’, where rocket pads lay empty, inhabited by people filled with a desperate nostalgia, collecting Astronaut bones as fetishistic totems and generally contemplating the ‘moral and biological rightness of space exploration.’"

After reading this I had to fall back on my usual therapy space travel therapy, the opening credits to Enterprise.  Here's the version from the later series with the country beat and when they'd given up all attempts to pretend it wasn't Star Trek by missing that bit out of the title:



I always imagine in the Roddenberryverse the Space Shuttle Enterprise actually flew.