Is anyone else embarrassed about the state of our space program?

Well, since none of you seemed to pay attention to this, NASA today launched the Orion spacecraft, which will theoretically be the craft that takes us to Mars and the asteroids. It is the successor to the Saturn V... which was made in the mid-60s. This is also the furthest a craft capable of carrying humans on it has gone since 1972. And the test went great, which is fortunate since NASA's budget has been cut so much that they can't afford to do another test run for nearly 4 fricking more years (which next time will orbit the Moon and return).

Anyone else really fricking embarrassed by this? It's taken us since the Nixon administration to have not left low Earth orbit. To put it into perspective on how far we've gone since 1972, if the Earth was scaled down to the size of a basketball, then Moon would be 30 feet across the room, and we as a species would have merely gone 3/8 of an inch off of that basketball since 1972.

It's fricking ridiculous that the national ink budget is higher than NASA's, since it's around 4/10ths of a penny on the tax dollar. Meanwhile various forms of welfare are around 15% of the tax dollar and the military has an outrageously ridiculous budget at 55% on the tax dollar. Is it too much to ask to give NASA like 8/10ths of a penny, and then go out into space and explore and discover?

Only one news outlet covered the launch live this morning, and it was Fox News. The others were talking about petty bullshite on a robber getting shot by a police man when he tried to take his gun. That's more important than this? Really? We are mortgaging our future not only as a nation, but as a species. No one gives a frick anymore, and while it probably won't happen in my lifetime, this is the only thing that will save us from inevitable extinction. Some variation of Interstellar is not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHEN. We will go extinct on this planet, whether it be nukes, plague, super volcano, asteroids, or blight, our extinction on this planet is assured so long as we keep up this shite with only caring about what happens 4 years in the future.

We are a society of instant and selfish gratification. If we can't see an immediate benefit for us within a year or two, we decide to say "frick it" and give up. On the path that we are on, we may as well crawl back to the cave. NASA is one of the greatest things our country has ever invested in, and has done more than just provide us with Velcro and Tang. Do you think its a coincidence that basically all the technological innovators in the late 70s through mid 80s grew up watching man walk on the Moon? No, they saw that and knew they wanted to be scientists and engineers. It is estimated that for every dollar spent on NASA, 7 dollars are returned. It's an incredibly sound investment that pays off in ways most people don't even realize.

So am I the lone sane man in a world full of nuts?