The Long (Space Age) Hiatus Needs To End

Recently I've been reading and watching documentaries about the Voyager mission. The more I've learned about it, the more flabbergasted I've become at the long hiatus we, as a society, have taken about exploring outer space. Sure, we all awe at the breathtaking images the venerable Hubble Space Telescope and certainly felt utmost excitement when the Mars Pathfinder sent the images of our red planetary neighbor. However, at this point, I think we have all but abandoned space research. We, as society, leave that task  to the academicians and practitioners at NASA (or its subsidiaries) without much care whether they take their funding away, or budget constraints put missions on indefinite stand-by. I find perplexing that with the incredible advances in science and technology in the last twenty years, we don't have plans to have a human on mars in, say, the next ten years. We are perching on information from a mission that was conceived and launched thirty-plus years ago. Those people, that generation didn't have the technology we have today -- not even in their remote dreams. They had to MAKE the technology. They endeavored in a mission they had anecdotal information about. They pushed forward with a lot of theoretical knowledge, but very little, if any, practical sapience. They painstakingly designed gear to withstand the trip, and then when they found out that those specs were not going to be sufficient to survive the hazards of inter planetary travel, they redesigned and retooled it pretty much on the fly: everything from electronics, to the vessel itself. There was a huge push and pressure to get it right. It was much more than seeing the giants of the solar system "up close". It was about expanding the bounds of human knowledge. And at that, I would say, the Voyager Mission was a colossal success that caused "shockwaves" we still hear about  to this day.

Why should we not do that again but with loftier goals?  Why can't we think about and beyond of what's known? We have gained a substantial amount of knowledge and technology since the Voyager Mission set sail, in terms of materials science, computer science, electronics, telecommunications and so forth. Why not harness that in order to learn more about our solar system? Let's send a drone to do "Recon", if you will, of Venus' crust? Let's learn more about Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Let's send space craft there, take samples and bring them back! Imagine being able to see/examine/study a piece of the crust of one of Jupiter's moons? How about sending probes to Neptune and Triton. You get the idea: let's expand the bounds of human knowledge again! If we can spend days musing about HTML semantics, distributed databases, metrics and code poetry, we surely can support those who spend their days musing about the exact chemical make-up of a distant planet or what would it take to put a human on Mars (and back). I think it's crucial we get the Space Age back to the forefront and as a priority for the advancement of the human race.