“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” These iconic words take us back to a time when America did big things. Big things that didn't entail a family size bucket from a chicken restaurant. While it’s incredibly likely that we only did those things because we were in a race against the Soviet menace, the fact remains that we did them. And while that was a frightening time in both American, and world history, it was also a time of hope that the future would be better than today. With the end of the space shuttle era (Yahoo! News), I fear that the dream of the space age is gone, and with it the hope for the future of mankind. Now, I don’t mean to be a fear monger, after all I’m not a politician, but I believe that one of the most important things that we can be doing with our tax money (and yes we should pay taxes) is to invest in the future of the USA, and Humanity as a whole, by financing human space flight and space exploration.