Very well written article with a lot of food for thought.  Musk is thinking along the lines of colonizing Mars to save the human race.  This is visionary thinking; maybe realistic, maybe not, but visionary.<p>The Americans have a great love of adventure that extends to space travel, but we are also an impatient people who want Buck Rogers and the 25th Century to happen tomorrow and not in 450 years.<p>Unfortunately, Vietnam and the Great Society and post-Vietnam stagflation of the 1970s put an end to our brief push out of the gravity well.  Trillions of dollars were earmarked for other purposes, pushing Nasa and its quaint, difficult-to-understand projects to the back burner.<p>Post-Apollo, Nasa limped along with the Space Shuttle and the I.S.S., but the Shuttle is dead and the I.S.S. will eventually lose its political support.  Now we can&#x27;t even fly our astronauts to the I.S.S. without Russian assistance.  What kind of commitment to human space flight does that demonstrate?<p>So, it&#x27;s refreshing to see a smart visionary like Elon Musk actually walk the walk.  If he says he&#x27;s going to put a greenhouse full of plants on Mars by 2030, I believe him.  This is a project that Nasa could have, and should have, done long since.<p>But since the country no longer supports this kind of public effort, at least we can place our hopes in private efforts to accomplish the same thing.  Many of the 15th-16th Century explorers of the New World were privately funded, after all.<p>Probably in the end, it will be public-private partnerships that get us into space for good; the country will decide that it wants people to be in space, and firms like SpaceX will become contractors to Nasa like the rocket companies of old.  But the difference will be that these newer companies are space-capable on their own, can launch their own craft from their own pads and bypass Nasa completely.  Perhaps Nasa will then be more of a research organization, doing the deep space probes and basic research that private firms can&#x27;t justify.