It should be so simple. Just why not send a rocket to the Moon and install a good telescope? We have gone there, in fact almost 30 years ago, and remote control should not be an issue nowadays, with robot rovers on Mars. Or work a little harder and send someone to Mars itself. There is technology for that. Why nothing of this is actually being done but talked about at most?
To answer these, and many other questions, some dull but unavoidable perspective must be analyzed.
As this work progressed it became clear it could not be packed in a single piece without the risk of boring away most readers, so it will be broken down in installments sprinkled into the future.
What for?
The goals for space exploration may be diverse, from acquisition of scientific knowledge, to search for answers to basic cosmology (and existential) questions, to economic rewards waiting for conquer, to just the sheer satisfaction of getting there, maybe exteriorization of a specie's quest for expansion into every affordable niche.
It should be tempting to delve into a provocative philosophical discussion regarding which should indeed be the ultimate goals for the enterprise. Goals which pervade all kinds of human endeavors at their very roots.
But we will restrain to the science angle, to the type of questions burning in cosmologist's minds. Answers which each time we arrive to, pose at the same time new questions and new insights - sometimes in totally unrelated fields - trickling down to society as a whole in the form of tools and goods for a (hopefully) better life.
As said, for the sake of readability we'll restrict in this article to a limited scope. The questions and efforts addressed by earth and space-borne instruments, leaving for another opportunity those concerned with unmanned and manned longer-range missions.
On the same vein, we'll leave for the future those projects dealing with phenomena other than the electromagnetic spectrum from deep infrared to X rays. The lower range belonging to radio and microwaves, and the upper end belonging to the most energetic form of radiation, that is gamma rays, will be covered later.
The same holds for other exotic forms of radiation such as gravity waves, which - to have a taste for what the future has in store - we'll say is an entirely new window into the Universe which promises profound impact in cosmology and theoretical physics development.
You may notice some projects seem to overlap, in areas like resollution, spectral band or candidate targets. This is quite normal and in fact beneficial, providing a form of backup and cross verification of results.
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