On April 12, 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space. Within that first decade all of the firsts, at least with manned spaceflight had been accomplished, at least the ones that haven’t been topped today. We’ve not only been to space, but we’ve been to the moon. Unmanned probes and rovers have explored much of the solar system and Voyager 1 and 2 as well as Pioneer 10 and 11 are currently exiting the farthest reach of the solar system.

If budgets hadn’t shrunk and the push for exploration hadn’t let up, just imagine where we’d be now. There are some new plans in the works for the next 50 years such as:

• The moon…again. The US scrapped it’s plan to return to the moon, so China and Russia want to catch up.
• Near-Earth asteroids. This one’s exciting because it would require hitting a small moving target. Just imagine the computers required to target the asteroid and then once they get to it, to keep the spacecraft close enough to the asteroid to allow the astronauts back on, but not so close as to have a catastrophic collision. Scientific American points out that this wouldn’t require a separate lander, but I do hope that they have some kind of a back up system either to minimize the risk of damage to the main spacecraft or as a back up to get the crew home.
• Mars. The US wants to get there by 2030. Russia is doing studies on the psychological impacts that might have. 
• Lagrange point. “a manned mission to a Lagrange point in space, one of five gravitational equilibrium points in the sun–Earth system where gravitational and centrifugal forces balance to create a relatively stable place to essentially hover in a deep-space orbit.”

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were new projects that could get Americans excited about space and even science as a whole again?

You can check out the whole article at Scientific American.