We aren’t exactly living in the golden age of space exploration. The last manned moon mission was over four decades ago by now, when Apollo 17 launched in December of 1972. And since the first moonwalk, there hasn’t been much in the way of human achievement in space. Sure, there has been enormous progress with all sorts of probes and exploratory spacecraft, but human beings haven’t set foot on a new planetary body since the 1960s.

Optimistic estimations from several decades ago were that we’dbe on Mars by now, but we haven’t even come close. Even now, the next NASA mars mission keeps getting pushed further and further back, and right now a tentative estimation of “sometime in the 2030s” is the best we have.

Part of the problem is a lack of inspiration. Much of the early space race was fueled by a nearly fanatical drive towards competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. There was a significant fear that if the Soviet Union were to beat the US in the space race, they would become an even greater military threat than they already were. And that’s not even to mention the enormous amount of national pride that was on the line.

A major obstacle for major space missions in the present, however, is a simple lack of funding. In the 1960s, NASA had funding from the government equal to 2.4% of the national budget. These days, NASA receives less than half of a percent of the national budget, and can barely afford most of its missions.

If NASA had the same budget today as it did in the 1960s,

adjusted for inflation, it would be receiving roughly 200 billion dollars.

Instead, it gets only 18 billion. Which seems like a lot of money to the

average citizen, but in reality that’s hardly anything, certainly not enough to

put a man on the moon.

One of the ways that NASA is dealing with this budget deficiency is to form partnerships with private companies, working together with them to develop new and improved space technology, or to fund missions. These partnerships are called the NextSTEP, and they’re responsible for helping out significantly with a lot of NASA’s recent missions.

Recently, NASA announced that it was working with some of its NextSTEP partners to produce a new permanent space habitat to replace the current International Space Station, which will be retired in 2020, only four years from now. Some of the prototypes put forward by the NextSTEP partners are far more… ambitious than what you normally see from NASA nowadays, which hopefully means that we might be seeing a revitalization of the space programs in the near future.

Of note is the plan suggested by Orbital ATK, which includes a large cislunar habitat- “cislunar” meaning “near the moon”. The idea is for a large, tube-like habitat to be built in space and then set on an orbit that will periodically take it within landing distance of the moon, allowing for moon missions to resume at a much cheaper rate than would be possible otherwise.

If this design is implemented, we will hopefully be seeing humans returning to the moon for the first time in over 40 years, and the cislunar habitat- tentatively named Cygnus- may even serve as a jumping off point for future Mars missions.