[frogjerk]

Even as of last February, NASA's Kepler spacecraft had identified 1,235 exoplanet candidates (yellow and dark-blue dots), far more than the count of transiting exoplanets known prior to the mission (lighter violet dots). Click on the image for a larger version. Planet diameters are plotted vertically, orbital periods are plotted horizontally; these early discoveries orbit closer to their stars than Earth orbits the Sun. (The Jupiter, Neptune, and Earth illustrations at right are not to scale with each other.) [NASA / Wendy Stenzel]

And thanks to Obama we can only HOPE to travel to the stars or even the other planets one day.

[SunkenCiv]

Zero won’t be President forever (although there are people I know who want him to be, guess why?) and his idiotic choices for NASA suggest it will require a complete housecleaning and reorganization after the POS is out of office. He has damaged the US government, US foreign policy, and our liberty, and has been making steady war on the sciences throughout his term. Science isn’t important to him, only Islam.

The only ticket to another star (and a nearby one at that) which is currently within reach is a plasma drive for a probe (unmanned, obviously); the nearest star is the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, and even a plasma-drive probe would take a really long time to get there. Plasma engines are capable of firing for years on end, but the acceleration is a slow process, and an onboard source of electricity has to be relied on during all that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/10/ad_astra_nasa_vf200_announcement/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/25/vasimr_vx_200_fullbore_efficiency/