A lot of the equipment that goes up into space is partially produced and/or funded by private organizations, and those organizations are given exclusive access to the resulting data for a specified period of time. Since they're private businesses, they need to know they're going to get at least some kind of ROI.

Also, alot of the data that comes back from space probes comes back as purely digital data that needs to be processed and converted into usable forms. The Hubble Space Telescope, for example, does not produce visual images on the fly - the images need to be reconstructed from the data Hubble downlinks.

As for your other question, I'd like to think we'd get more people on another world in the next 50 years, but I wouldn't guarantee it.

[By the way, on the Internet, posting in all capital letters is considered shouting (in other words, it's rude), and it also tends to be harder to read than regular upper-lower casing. Just as a matter of courtesy, please turn off the shift-lock on your keyboard. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] ]

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SeanF

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