fuck, that is two decades ago. i am over 50 now and the most interesting things that happened during my life time regarding the space frontier is elon musk sending a tesla towards mars and a team of female scientists from india successfully sending a probe to mars with a smaller budget than the movie the martian. (well ok, there were the voyager probes and the hubble telescope, too)
in general i feel a bit betrayed regarding human endeavors in space. whatever happened to the future?
If the step is behind us then space colonization is a given and we will begin as soon as our technology allows it, but if it is ahead of us then this means that either space colonization is way harder than we thought or there is an unknown step that we still need to overcome, like avoiding self-destructing ourselves with our technological advances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox