[TheBigSalad]

That's a fair question. I've never heard it argued that the human genome project was anything other than a huge success, but I'm curious to look into it more. That being said it probably doesn't apply here. Considering we were sending people to the moon 50 years ago, I don't feel space travel has scaled similarly. In contrast to your human genome example think how far back the scientific community was set back by canceling the Super Conducting Supercollider. There's just no other way to get this information from Earth. You could argue that the knowledge could wait 100 years, but you could say that about a lot of things.