> you have to present a better constructive narrative that could be accepted as "even cooler" by believers
The article mentions some alternatives.
>> One path forward would be to build on the technological revolution of the past fifty years and go explore the hell out of space with robots. This future is available to us right now. Simply redirecting the $11.6 billion budget for human space flight would be enough to staff up the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and go from launching one major project per decade to multiple planetary probes and telescopes a year. It would be the start of the greatest era of discovery in history.
If your space software project is late, just throw more people at it - it will be done that much faster!
Like really, even if you indeed made the JPL budget 100x bigger, at least short term you would indeed have the issue if not enough people being available to build and run all those robotic missions.
I'd think that "send modern probes to every one of the interesting moons of saturn and Jupiter" would be pretty amazing. For all we know one of them could be crawling with life!
The article mentions some alternatives.
>> One path forward would be to build on the technological revolution of the past fifty years and go explore the hell out of space with robots. This future is available to us right now. Simply redirecting the $11.6 billion budget for human space flight would be enough to staff up the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and go from launching one major project per decade to multiple planetary probes and telescopes a year. It would be the start of the greatest era of discovery in history.
Personally, I find that idea inspiring!