NASA is Lame

NASA has so much potential, but for whatever reasons, they dink around in LEO. For the price of the Space Station (~$100B) I have to imagine we could have made at least 5 manned missions to Mars by now.

It's all a matter of will and priority. At our current technological and economical level, there is nothing stopping us from sending a manned mission to Mars by next year. But nope. We've got this extremely long and vague calender that alludes to somethin' or other starting around 2020... And no, NASA, don't go to an asteroid. Go to Mars. Seriously.

What we need is another space race. With nothing driving us forward we'll never go anywhere. Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites has mentioned the coming Private Space Race, a race driven by capitalism and competition in the private sector. But the private space industry is only going to take over the maintenance of LEO, leaving deep space exploration to NASA.

NASA: Do your job. Seriously.