content: Yeah, if you look at a lot of the practical problems with space exploration a lot of them could be fixed with comparatively minor genetic tweaks. A good example is the food issue: humans could live off of spirulina algae and vitamin pills, meaning that an entirely closed life support system would be possible, if it weren't for the  whole gout issue. Now it turns out there are only a very few species that have that problem, and most likely we could just do one gene swap and solve the problem. One swap, no new engineering, nothing that nature hasn't already done, could make space travel that much easier.