Hi!

I've returned to Toronto from visiting my aging dad in British Columbia.
He's now in his "mid-eighties".
I had opportunity, traveling, to muse
on "what has come to pass" during his lifespan.
To put his age in perspective, is
to put a worthwhile perspective on
the evolution of aviation, space-travel and technology in general over 3/4ths of a century.

Put it this way: When my dad first started attending school [back in the
first-half of the 1920's], Charles Lindbergh was an obscure airmail pilot;
very few seriously thought transatlantic flight would become routine and commercially viable. Robert Goddard
was considered by the few who knew him to be a 'nutty' physics professor
who had 'crazy ideas' abut sending a rocket to the moon [The first crude
liquid-fueled rocket had yet to take flight]...And "cutting-edge" technology
in the mid-1920's were?...Coast-to-coast
"live" AM radio broadcasts using telephone link-up, automobiles with
electric safety-starters, aircraft
that could reach altitudes over 30,000ft
or [with the USAAC] bombing planes that could carry 2000Ib bomb loads at speeds
little faster than a speedy automobile.
There weren't even crude experimental
television devices in labs in the mid-1920's. And computers?....Only pulp science-fiction writers back then
envisioned "room-sized electronic brains".

How times have changed!
My dad has lived long enough to see
not only television [in color and satellite-relayed too], but he has also
lived to see the development of atomic energy, bio-engineering, desk-top and laptop computers, and supersonic commercial jets routinely spanning the
Atlantic.
As for space-travel?...In the mid-1920's, only Goddard and a handful of others dared theorize the possibility; now, in 2002, my dad has lived to witness two "space-tourists" journeying to a 200-ton [growing] space-station, he has witnessed two
robotic spacecraft orbiting Mars simultaneously, one still orbiting Jupiter, others having flown by
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and beyond, still others having landed on an NEO asteroid, on Venus, and landed and roved on Mars and the Moon [including a commercial satellite having been diverted to a lunar flyby].
And of course he's witnessed the historic Apollo missions with men having
bounced across, driven and played golf
on the Moon, and lived to see a fleet of 100ton space-gliders make over 100 successful journeys to LEO; evening ferrying some political passengers to orbit.

And if my dad lives to be 90 years old [2007-2008], he may witness that space station grow to about 500 tons, and see a spacecraft orbit Saturn, another return with samples from a comet, still another return with samples
from an asteroid, and [possibly] some commercial spacecraft may orbit the moon, leave the Solar System [with DNA],
and carry out 'routine' suborbital space-tourist flights.

If you're discouraged by all the launch and mission-funding failures,
take heart with the more up-beat perspective I've given you from my dad's life-span.
cheers.

Jacob

So I ask,