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Part of me is incredibly depressed. While I understand that we might not be able to predict the chaos that is this thing's descent, the fact that we can't even track it reliably, and yet have expectations to travel to other worlds and expand the human species to new worlds makes me realize that the pace of progress has slowed to a crawl as far as space exploration goes. We're more likely to become a machine/cyber society than an interstellar one at this point.
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Someone probably had real-time data. But the capabilities and limitations of that were not going to be broadcast for entertainment purposes. The NSA gave NASA not one, but two spare Hubble-class telescopes they had extra laying around a few years back. Of course if we didn't have the capability, we probably would still make up a precise time and location where it went down to make people think we did. So this isn't a rock solid argument on its own.
From a technology perspective we could do much, much more than we do today... it's just the will and the money that is missing.