Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Profound Twitter Post

I was looking at Twitter today and, following the announcement of the death of Gene Cernan, the last human being to stand on the moon, noticed that famous astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson had posted something pretty profound:

In 1927 Lindbergh flew from NY to Paris. 45 yrs later, in 1972 we last walked on the Moon. 45 yrs later, in 2017 we… we… we...

Truth be told, we have done nothing to push back the frontiers of human space exploration since President Nixon had curtailed the Apollo moon program to only six landings...other than low Earth-orbit projects like the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station  or by the use of unmanned, remotely controlled probes.  The irony of all this is that Spiro Agnew, Nixon's vice-president, at the time seemed to be very excited about the space program, once predicting that we would reach Mars by 1989.  But it wasn't until several presidents later, with the administration of George W. Bush, that serious efforts were undertaken to plan and build a return mission to the moon, as an intermediary step to go to Mars and beyond.  Yet soon after Barack Obama became president, he scrapped Bush's moon plans...sarcastically (and foolishly) stating that "we've already been there"...and laid out a different personal vision of where HE wanted the country to go...asteroids and eventually Mars, using private companies and leaning on Russia to help us with space launches for several years.  And I think you're seeing where the main problem regarding NASA and our manned space program lies.  NASA is a government agency in the executive branch, and the president has direct control over its priorities and projects.  So with each new president comes a different emphasis and very little continuity of vision and mission...

Tyson's tweet accurately puts it all out there: from 1927 to 1972 our frontiers went from the first transatlantic plane flight to the last of six moon landings...and in the 45 years since then we haven't even kept what we had accomplished, instead now barely able to even get out of our own atmosphere.  And now here we go again with a new incoming president who, I'm confident, will once again "reset" the agenda for NASA in a different direction from his predecessor's.  I don't see much hope of getting out of this rut as long as our space program remains the private football of the sitting president, to kick around however he or she sees fit.  In the meantime, we can always count on our good, dependable friends the Russians to help us out, right?