A few days ago I ran into one of them, someone who voices, quite loudly, that our stepping out into Space was wasting money and resources we need here. I am afraid I was quite rude to that person. And it made me think on it again.

I am going to revisit the loss of the Columbia in a way, not looking back, looking forward.

A few days after it happened I wrote

“These are those who dare, they who walk the very bleeding edge of Human knowledge and Technologies. They stare into the unknown and never blink. They have been with us for a long time that kind of Human. This kind of Human is why we are where we are, and why we shall one day step out into the void beyond this single solar system.”

I believe that even more deeply today. Even now I can step out my back door and look up at what calls them, their eyes look a little higher than ours. Their Sirens are the stars, we need those people, badly, maybe more now than ever.

Because they give the rest of us the dreams, the deep seated wanting of new horizons.

A strange way to put it wouldn’t you think? New Horizons? Where they go, there are no horizons!. Just the vastly uncluttered stretch of Eternity. A view from here to the very beginning of what we have learned to call time.

A lot of folk make the comment it is a waste of money, time and precious resources. That there’s no good coming from it.

Ask the guy who just came out of a CAT scan that found a small tumor that would have been inoperable if it became large enough to detect with conventional means.

Ask the woman who crashed her car into a bridge abutment, and walked away carrying her child from the wreckage, unhurt because the Airbag worked flawlessly.

Ask the quadriplegic who can actually work because the micro-circuitry in his computerized chair can detect his eye movements.

I could fill a hundred pages with examples of technologies that have enhanced our lives, and saved a damned lot of them. All from the Space Program.

Yeah, Right. Americans spend more money on junk food each year than the space program.

We spend more money on dreck than our own damned future! At my age I have come to question the collective intelligence of the species, Homo Sapiens. A line in a movie I heard once sums it up, Humans are smart, People are stupid, somewhere else I heard the a wry comment that the collective intelligence of an average group was the inverse sum square of the number in the group.

Well put.

Sooner or later crunch time will come, our species will come to the crossroads, time to put up, or shut up. Will we go the way of the Dodo, Woolly Mammoths and countless thousands of other species once common to our small blue marble home. I ponder what will take our place? Descendants of the roaches, another primate species gets a ride to grab for the golden ring? I really don’t care, even if they make it as far as we have, they still won’t be human.

I have long wondered, which will it be? Will we find it within ourselves to make the sacrifices that may be called for? Or will the basic short sidedness of human nature win out? Will we condemn our descendants to an impoverished, overpopulated, mined out, farmed out, polluted and thirsty world? Many experts say the next big wars will be fought over water, there is simply insufficient clean usable water for all of us to live on. It isn’t oil, which can be synthesized to some extent, food can be grown or made with sufficient technologies. It is WATER! The most basic need of all living things. Three, four days without water and we die, no way around it. We can’t make water, and 98% of it on this planet is unusable. Be that as it is, looking further out, elemental raw materials can be stripped out of the crust for so long, even the most efficient recycling program doesn’t recover 100% of input. Sooner or later it will be gone, some vital element will slowly be used up. It will take a long time, centuries for sure, maybe Eons. But the end is the same if came tomorrow, or in 1000 years.

A very good friend called it Out There, Where the Big Ships Go. He had a vision of what might be, his deep conviction swayed my own beliefs.

He would tell me this many times over the years I knew him.
Do we go, will we have the vision, the guts, and be willing to see some of us die in horrible ways to make it? Or do we sentence the species to a long slow agonizing death? I can imagine it, the last few humans killing each other for precious few scraps found in the garbage piles we leave behind?

I fervently hope not, I hope there will be sufficient numbers of those with the vision, the Brass Plated Titanium Balls to do the hard thing. To let go of a little bit to make it possible.

And, it will require the very type of Human that we lost when the Columbia fell, the same kind that was on the Challenger, in the Apollo Capsule, several Russian Space Craft, you can follow that line all the way back to the first Homo Sapiens Sapiens who peeked at the crossing from Africa to the rest of the world just before a predator got them. And the next who dared and the one after them............ until one of them made it. And here we are.

Those are the kind that take the steps that lead to words such as “One Small Step For A Man, A Giant Leap For Mankind.”

We desperately need them, may they be there when called upon.