Traveling on your own planet (which is easy and cheap) and traveling to an unknown planet in space which costs trillions of dollars and takes a minimum of 20,000 years are two very different things. Lets keep things in perspective now.

Traveling a few hundred miles to see a creature you can stand a few feet away from, touch, and study /AND/ traveling for millions of years, never seeing the fruit of your labor so that your great X 1,000 grandchildren might be able to reach a planet they can walk around on in an air tight suit for the rest of their lives, then send a signal back to earth which will take 20 years to reach. That's a whole new "field trip".