Apparently the recession has reached the final frontier. NASA is offering a once-in-a-lifetime sale on its old shuttles, slashing the prices by more than $10 million. To sweeten the deal, they’ll be giving the engine away for free.

Certainly NASA will find a couple of idiots - desperate for attention - to buy the shuttles and maybe the media will give it a little coverage, mentioning the whole event in no more than a paragraph. But here is where you have to wonder, when did the world lose interest in space culture? (Or maybe NASA projects)

Since the early 1960's, when Yuri Gagarin became the first man to reach outer space, everyone kept talking about traveling even further into the unknown. When Armstrong set foot on the moon an estimated number of half a billion people watched the landing, keep in mind that not everyone had a TV back then and the Internet we know didn't exist. Until the late 1980's the ratings stayed relatively high but then came the fall of the Soviet Union and thus ended the competition between the two rivals.

From that point on interest in the space race dwindled and the number of viewers that tuned in to watch a shuttle takeoff started to decline, leading to an era where no one cared anymore. (I dare a non-geek person to name the shuttle that is still exploring Mars at the moment)

The problem is that funding for space technology is decreasing due to the lack of interest, meaning that the hope of someday inhabiting another planet is no longer as tangible as it once was and traveling to Jupiter isn’t going to happen anytime in the near future. But hey, who wants to go to a real planet when there is a virtual planet called Pandora made by James Cameron, right?