The Looming Extinction of The Right Stuff

...is still around--but it's gone private as space advocates have realized government isn't going to let us go into space because a.) we're not government employees, and b.) we couldn't qualify anyway. If you want to see where the Right Stuff has gone, check out the National Space Society (www.nss.org), Virgin Galactic (Sir Richard Branson's new venture to sell sub-orbital tourist flights), Bigelow Aerospace (working to build a hotel on orbit, and recently launched a scale-model of an inflatable module for the same), and many others.

Your statement about Mars and Diet Coke may well be prescient because private enterprize is generally more efficient than government when it comes to actually settling any new areas. Note how governments financed the exploration of this country, but generally backed up and only offered incentives for settling it (the Homestead Act as an example). Now that commercialization of space development is underway, government needs to get out of the way again.

In other words, don't give up hope for the settlement of space just yet.