Does space ever end?

No argument; I read that book some time ago. Great for learning how to visualize such things as higher dimensions -- rather, for learning how to figure out what we would visualize them as if we could visualize them, which we are (unfortunately) incapable of. Yeah, that made sense, honest, you just don't think it did.

Space ends when Griffin quits NASA.

Griffin has his hands tied by the current US Administration. As previously pointed out, 2 recent wars - one still going, Katrina, plus other competing home priorities are sapping the political will of the nation. That includes the current STS and ISS programs.

Unfortunately Griffin is slowly being squeezed to death and the Vision along with him. The current program might get the US back to the Moon but no way is it going to end up as a long term human base and Mars - well you can forget about it UNLESS the privates or another nation up the ante and we end up with a race on our hands a la Apollo.

I think China & India scare the US, just a little. They don't want Americans to look up in 20 years and see Chinese & Indian bases on the Moon, and ask "Where are our bases?", "What were we doing back in the 00's & 10's?"

I don't think the US goverment has the political will to actually do what they could at this time, but they may have enough to build a 'capability' that they can expand on if/when they really have to.

*grabs the topic by the shoulders and wrestles it back on track* *AHEM* Anyways. Back to the 7-year-old.

Most of these musings could be of only small value to a 7 year old, but here are the thoughts of some folks with a substantially greater literary gift than us geeks whom really know the answer (or at least think we do, see Twain at the end):

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of space and time.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing.
-- Descartes

Mathematicians often resort to something called Hilbert space, which is described as being n-dimensional. Like modern sex, any number can play.
-- Dr. Thor Wald, "Beep/The Quincunx of Time", by James Blish

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time.
-- Merrick Furst

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, 1941

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
-- Thomas Carlyle, looking at the stars

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
-- Mark Twain

A map of the universe:
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~mjuric/universe/