It's like everything else, there are essentially unlimited dreams out there, but limited resources to realize them. Adjusted for inflation, NASA's budget is less than half of what it was during the peak of the Apollo years. Had we maintained that level of funding, we could've done many of the projects Gary describes.

Unfortunately, there are competing factions out there all fighting for more funding to meet their unlimited dreams. The political reality is that the space budget is probably as much as we can get for the foreseeable future. There just isn't enough political clout in the space community to get much more.

We can try to spend the money we do get better, but once again, we're up against competing factions all fighting for their piece of the budget.

We can all dream of the day when private industry will do things better and cheaper than NASA. We can cheer for Burt Rutan and the other X Prize teams. We all hope that SpaceX succeeds. They are showing the way. Now comes the difficult part - getting the necessary funding to go further.