The year is 2011. By now, we should have flying DeLoreans and alien overlords. In reality, 2011 only offers the same crap we saw last decade. What’s worse, 2011 marks the end of NASA’s manned space shuttle program.

On July 21, the shuttle Atlantis touched down for the last time, ending a program NASA began in 1981.

Russia (and their commie cosmonauts) will continue manned space flight, allowing other countries to buy expensive seats on their rockets. And although Russia commands the cosmos, NASA assures the public they have not faded away.

In 2013, NASA expects to launch Curiosity, which will study changes in Mars’s atmosphere. Some scientists believe that Mars used to contain water when its atmosphere was thicker. NASA sums up the mission as a search for “microbial life on the red planet.”

Missions like this are just a waste of tax dollars, for some. To others, they answer the perennial questions of life. Astrophysicist Carl Sagan went further, saying “all civilizations become either space-faring or extinct.”

Personally, I doubt NASA will save humanity from extinction but if America’s latest budget can afford to “modernize our nuclear arsenal,” it can probably afford to keep sending people into space. Maybe Barack Obama thinks the shuttles are a waste because they don’t blow up enough people.

Eventually, space travel may no longer require government funding. According to NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle, we should turn space travel over to private companies. Cagle claims that many “are now in reach of settling new frontiers such as Mars and even further.” Leading the commercial space race is the Sierra Nevada Corporation. Their shuttle, the “Dream Chaser,” hopes to take space tourists into zero gravity as early as 2015.

Private space travel is not as far-fetched as one may think. The chairman behind Dream Chaser explains that private space travel is far cheaper than NASA’s flights, primarily because the Chaser will carry much less cargo than a NASA shuttle.

So space travel will be a reality for our generation — or at least the extremely wealthy part of our generation. Sierra Nevada is considering flights to the International Space Station, as well as several day voyages through outer space. Either way, chairman Mark Sirangelo told MSNBC, “it could be a pretty interesting trip.”

Despite these advances, most of us will probably never make it to space. And with NASA falling into obscurity, what do we have to hope for? According to NASA’s website, human spaceflight will not end along with their shuttle program. In fact, NASA claims to be designing a capsule that can take four astronauts to Mars.

Landing on Mars is the least our generation can do. It took our parents a single decade to go from having no astronauts to landing a man on the moon. And yes, they definitely landed a man on the moon. With or without NASA, our generation will probably make it to Mars one day. And when that day comes, we will laugh at Columbus and laugh at Armstrong, for we have achieved greater things!

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image: Bill Ingalls/NASA

08/18/11 – Editor’s note: changed “Curious” to “Curiosity” and fixed an incorrect date.