Twenty five years after Lewis and Clark returned from exploring western America the Conestoga wagons were rolling.
Twenty five years after the Wright Brothers flew their tiny flying machine Americans were buying airline tickets.
Twenty five years after Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon, we sit at home watching old astronauts on talk shows reminisce the good old days.
To a 25 year old American the "Greatest Moment in Human History" is ancient history. So is it any wonder polls find pessimism about the future among that generation? Listening to Neil Armstrong as he put his foot upon the Lunar surface, that twenty five year old American, having been told to expect a future less prosperous than their parents had, has the right to ask a few tough questions: "A giant leap to where? For what? For who?" "What happened? Where's the grand frontier of NASA rhetoric? If NASA is our Lewis and Clark then when do the wagons roll? If space is supposed to be a frontier then when do the people get to go? At what date do we plan to see the first settlements on the Moon or in space? When can I or my child buy a ticket to ride?" 25 years after Apollo (more than 35 years after the space program started) it costs more, not less, to put a human in space. Meanwhile, we are fed lie after lie about a fantastic space station that has nothing at all to do with you and I, and the participation of the taxpayers who fund it all is reduced to listening to the astronaut's wake up music on CNN while waiting for another shuttle to blow up.
To top it all off, the head of NASA then dares to decry the lack of vision among the American people when they hesitate to pay for this mediocrity. What nerve. We have vision, lots of vision, NASA has simply failed to deliver a product Americans want.
When asked in polls almost 50% of Americans want to go into space themselves. If only for a brief visit. Unfortunately, at several million dollars a ticket they can't.
Conventional wisdom is that space is so expensive only governments can afford it. Wrong! Space is expensive precisely because it has been almost totally a government domain. Remember, these are the same people who bought us the million dollar toilet. Frankly, if the current space agency had been in charge of the American Frontier, all that would lie west of the Mississippi today would be a luxury condo for four government employees somewhere in Kansas.
If space is a real frontier then we must treat it as such. We must decide that opening the frontier is the goal by which we measure all of our human space activities, not science - settlement. This is a major distinction demanding a whole different national discussion. The scientists will be free to go off and have their own arguments. The debate is no longer humans versus robots. Human activities are the goal. Thus the new debate must be over the best and lowest cost way to open space to permanent human habitation. (This will often mean we send robots first - they're cheaper.)
The most important concept to then remember is this: We need our government to enable us to get to space and start the work of pioneering. Not to do space for us while we watch on TV. We cannot afford the cost.
--- Our first frontier priority must be to develop cheap, reliable, and clean transportation to space. We must immediately begin to phase out the old space shuttle, with its $1 billion dollar a flight cost and its ozone layer destroying motors. Instead the DC-X Single Stage To Orbit rocket project, with its rapid turn around, clean motors, and low cost should be made a national priority before the bureaucrats kill it.
--- We must cancel the ridiculously overpriced space station and let credible private firms who have excellent low cost ideas for alternatives bid for the job. This includes Russian firms and those US companies who plan to recycle the remaining giant space shuttle's giant propellant tanks, turning these $500 million dollar, 14 story tall structures into useful profit generating space facilities, instead of the current NASA practice of dumping them over the Pacific Ocean.
--- And we must return to the Moon, this time to stay. This means more than an Antarctica style camp, rather creating new enterprises in joint government and private ventures. For example, the Japanese are already developing systems to build large new solar powerplants built in space from Lunar soil-based on American designs. We know that the Moon's soil is over 40% oxygen, and there may be ice at the southern poles for water. The Lunar habitats have been designed and redesigned. We can do this. Why aren't we?
To survive as a nation we need the Space Frontier, a new national challenge that is exciting and involves the maximum number of us possible. It is vital to our democracy and our freedom that we have an external goal which unifies us. America cannot survive as the bureaucratic overlord of a gradually dying planet, crammed full with a divided humanity fighting over scraps and choking on its own wastes. The future of our nation cannot be to merely manage a world with no new horizons, but to lead the world out onto the endless horizon of space. Let us turn outwards before we turn on ourselves.
The Frontier is calling, and this time we need not take the lands from anyone else. This time, for the first time in history, we need not destroy precious life to improve our own, but can instead spread life to where there is none.
Imagine a kid desperate for a dream 25 years from now, sitting in a home powered by sunlight captured in space, who can look to the Moon or planets and know there are people just like her out there. Imagine the power to motivate our children to achieve, that will come from knowing that those people out there on the frontier are going to need more people the next year, and more after that, as humanity climbs out of the cradle.
On this Apollo anniversary we should honor the real heroes who made it
happen, but we must keep our eyes on the future, not the past. We must
understand that it is up to us this time and demand our birthright. We all
have the right stuff. You and me and that person over there. We are
Americans. We are a Frontier people. Give us our Frontier and let us prove
it!