I’ll be 63 in one week. I have often thought back with surprise at the fact that I was lucky enough to live at the same time as all the great space achievements. At the same time I am disappointed that we haven’t achieved much more. We achieved the pinnacle and then just stopped, and backpedaled. Now if we were to decide today to go back to the moon it would take longer and cost much more than it did in the 60s. We would have to re-invent the wheel. The reality is that I will be long gone before we go back to the Moon. I am sad but resigned to it.

The world is a much different place. It’s not like we expect Osama Bin Ladin, or Saddam Hussein
to challenge us in a race to the Moon. We aren’t going to go back till the technology and cost improve by orders of magnitude, and there are other reasons than political to make us go.