A Long Way To Go And No Way To Get There

     NASA has announced that the Kepler telescope has found what may be the best candidate for an extra-solar planet that could contain life. The planet which has been designated KOI 172.02, is just slightly larger than the Earth, and sits inside the habitable zone deemed most likely to harbor a planet with liquid water on it's surface, if water is present.
     I have to wonder why scientists and the media get so excited over these finds like this, after all, how are ever going to confirm whether or not these planets are habitable, or if they actually have life on them? It's not like we're going to slap a nuclear engine on one of the mothballed space shuttles and fly over there and check it out! We can't put together a decent proposition to put men back on the moon, or to travel to Mars, so what good is it going to be even if we found an alien planet outside our solar system that could harbor life, it's not like we're going to get there anytime soon.