To Go Where..

A SPACE SHUTTLE rolled down the highway near los angeles at two miles per hour, taking a route where hundreds of trees had been cut down  next to the temporarily steel reinforced highway, to allow passage on its way to retirement in a science park, where millions will be able to behold and appreciate it.

During their thirty years life, did the four shuttles accomplish anything worthwhile? They worked well, with only two catastrophies in hundreds of flights. And, the shuttle demonstrated that a reusable machine can be used to supply orbiting space stations, and, therefore, a potential base on the moon or mars.

We now have a space station, but few people seem to be interested in it; you don't hear much about it in the media, at any given time nobody knows how many people are in residence, or what they are doing.

There may come a time when human colonies on other planets are so common that they are also ingored by the media; or, there may not.

If humanity does not continue to reach for the stars, or reaches for them tentatively, as now, the shuttle will have been in vain. What other purpose could it be said to serve?

I was a wide eyed school boy in the nineteen sixties, eagerly following every apollo flight, enraptured by the moon landing. As a fourteen year old in nineteen sixty nine, I predicted that by the twenty first century there would be a permanent colony on the moon, one on mars, with preparations for manned travel outside the solar system.

We somehow got sidetracked, by the expense of the viet nam war, massive debt, massive military expenditures. presdent obama has deep sixed the mars and moon plans, which were already highly tentative. It may be that the chinese pioneer the moon and mars.

And it may be that homno sapiens must either grow, or die.

But it really doesn't matter who does it, as long as humanity does it. We may as well all do it together.