Americans are good at getting around the solar system.
It's what we do! 
But yeah, we need to get to work on that moon colony, or terraforming Mars.
Right.
But the other side of my comment is also meaningful.
In recent years, we have mainly seen our Presidents "taking pride" in US acheivements on the Battlefield.
The big question that no one wants to face is:
Can you really call them "acheivements"?
Or does the fact that we were there at all shows some sort of failure in our system?
The Curiousity achievement is far better than that, and something to be truly proud of. Thank goodness for that, at long last !
Maybe we can go back to the notion of JFK, keeping our economy going through space exploration, not by fighting wars spawned by the corrupted imaginations of a War-making cabal.
We can do better - We have done better today. One cheer for that, maybe two.
