One Giant Leap to Nowhere

I've been thinking about this a little bit lately, with all the hoopla around the 40th anniversary.<p>The moon landing, in the public mind, was like Lewis &#38; Clark -- it was exploration, trail-blazing. But the <i>point</i> was that once the trail was blazed, everyone else could follow, like pioneers going to California in the early 20th century. There would be space colonies, the West was no longer West, it was... Up! Out!<p>But none of that happened. It turned out that space travel was for supermen, not the everyman. And the everyman turned away. Space was just another place, like the corner office of a skyscraper, that rich, privileged, educated people -- <i>other</i> people -- got to go. And with that, and the conquest of the Soviets that Wolfe describes, we turned away.<p>The companies trying to do it faster, cheaper, better, and for anyone who wants to go are the heirs to the original impetus. They may eventually deliver on the promise that originally attracted the national attention: that this was a new beginning.

"<i>I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach. </i>"<p>-Bruce Sterling

The big mistake was declaring the moon a public commons. Instead it should be private property, first come, first serve....get there and stake a claim!

Reading this and a lot of other similar pieces makes you wish you were in a position to do something. Really though America's the only nation that could really pull off any real space progress at the moment and even that would be questionable with the current state of the enconamy.<p>Really though with a trillion dollar bailout, imagine the jobs that could be created and the uniting of the people with something like another space race but to mars.

I remember when I first heard of the fact that people have really landed on the moon, why such missions aren't commonplace now that its been 30 years since the first moon landing. I think I have never heard of people going to the moon in the past 2 decades of my living memory, maybe that's one of the reasons that people have come out with this conspiracy theory that people haven't really gone to the moon !

Wow, Wolfe writes like a God. Not a dull sentence (I read Bonfire of the Vanities and it was like stepping into another world).