Yes, but isn’t it a good idea to invest in future technologies like plasma rockets and orbital fuel depots?
It certainly is. All of these are exciting technologies and all have great potential value for future exploration. But it’s not a substitute for knowing where you want to go. Without specific goals in mind, we fear that this will have the effect of going in many directions at once, and ending up exactly where we started. Back in the 1960s, NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission spent a lot of money building nuclear-powered rocket engines that were abandoned after years of development, in part because they literally had no place to go.
