The Final Frontier is still there . . .
It’s hard to write these words and know what they might feel like 50 years from now. I never dreamed, when Apollo astronauts left the moon in 1972, that there might come a day when there was nobody still alive who had been to the moon. But now it seems that could come to pass. How heartbreaking is that? You could say that we have reached the sea, the very icy and black sea between us and the stars. Whether we will ever cross that sea nobody can say.
But the inventory of major planets — whether you count Pluto as one of those or not — is about to be done. None of us alive today will see a new planet up close for the first time again. In some sense, this is, as Alan Stern, the leader of the New Horizons mission, says, “the last picture show.”
. . . if we ever get around to it again. The most exhilarating thing I've ever seen was moon landing in 1969. It was after my tour in Vietnam, after a year of ugliness in the streets, just before Woodstock. It seemed the perfect way to end a decade, an era, a whole history of being stuck on this planet.
And the saddest thing in my lifetime is how we have just given up on space. It seems like the perfect metaphor for the progressive agenda. Just keep spreading the money around here, making miserable lives a less miserable, instead of spending it to explore new wonders.
