Our government-funded space exploration program is sort of caught in a loop-hole: The missions are boring to the public, so NASA gets less funding, and since NASA has less funding it can only afford to make "cheap" robotic missions. Exploration with humans being is just prohibitively expensive.
Space exploration will really pick-up only when private enterprises find a way to make money from space exploration, and space tourism is certainly NOT the only possibility. There are trillions and trillions of dollars worth of various rare materials and metals on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids.
Oh, and Spirit landed in the middle of such a "barren" dried lakebed on purpose: the sedimentary nature of the rocks make them ideal for checking what climate conditions they experienced in the past, and thus to see if life could have survived there. And a sandstorm recently scrubbed the surfaces of the rocks and soil clean, an even better situation.
And don't forget that a second, identical rover will land in a completely different part of the planet in a few weeks.
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Our government-funded space exploration program is sort of caught in a loop-hole: The missions are boring to the public, so NASA gets less funding, and since NASA has less funding it can only afford to make "cheap" robotic missions. Exploration with humans being is just prohibitively expensive.
Space exploration will really pick-up only when private enterprises find a way to make money from space exploration, and space tourism is certainly NOT the only possibility. There are trillions and trillions of dollars worth of various rare materials and metals on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids.
Oh, and Spirit landed in the middle of such a "barren" dried lakebed on purpose: the sedimentary nature of the rocks make them ideal for checking what climate conditions they experienced in the past, and thus to see if life could have survived there. And a sandstorm recently scrubbed the surfaces of the rocks and soil clean, an even better situation.
And don't forget that a second, identical rover will land in a completely different part of the planet in a few weeks.