Well before anyone went into space, I remember (I just turned 60) how it was expected that there were going to be so many scientific and engineering experiments that could only be carried out in the absence of gravity. We were going to make perfect ball bearings, concoct exotic chemical compounds and use the endless vacuum to conduct experiments that could only be done in space. In one embarassing recollection, we were going to build complex shadow-cooled electric circuits in which there would be no vacuum tubes because the valves' filaments would be directly exposed to airless space. Another suggestion was massive particle accellerators to take advantage of the need for no airtight vessels.

The space stations envisioned in the 50s and 60s were going to be busy factories as well as laboratories, with private enterprises lining up (and paying huge sums!) for their alloted time, like astronomers waiting for their turn at the telescope. There would be astronomical observatories, earth resources cameras, radio relay stations, chemical and physics labs. Personell, raw materials and equipment would be constantly going up, and finished product coming back. There would be many space stations: a space port, a research lab, a production facility, an observatory, earth observation stations, a zero-gee medical hospital, it was a glorious vision, and it still survives today in the legacy of how the old timers have designed our space programs, and in how the space community still thinks of them. I remember reading one SF tale where the satellite's commander takes sextant observations to plan his monthly orbital re-adjustment burn. No doubt he reduced his observations on a slide rule.

It all seems silly now, but it was perfectly understandable. All those predictions did come true, after all, just not in the way we expected. What we did not anticipate was how capable computational and communications technology would become, or the capabilities of miniaturization and integrated circuits. Many of those same predictions we made at the dawn of the space age have come to pass, but maybe not how we wanted them to. And our biggest shortcoming in prediction was that what would REALLY be of value in space would not be product, but information. It turned out that way right here on earth, too. The space enthusiasts of the von Braun and AC Clarke era thought in terms of post war industrial paradigms. It seems ironic, but those of us today who call ourselves space boosters are really quite retro in our approach and psychology: very 20th century.

Those of us brought up on the vision of the space-suited explorer making his way across an alien landscape, the role WE wanted to fill in the new frontier, are having trouble adjusting to this new automated, post-industrial space environment where all the meaningful work is outsourced to far away machines. Our vision is as obsolete as the high paying blue collar industrial jobs on the assembly lines of post war America. Sure, there are still situations were a man in a space suit is the only response to a problem or a discovery. But sending a man to fix an orbital device makes about as much sense today as sending your cell phone to the shop to get it fixed...or upgraded. And sending a manned mission to do a survey on an alien world makes even less sense than going window shopping in Paris when you can just inspect and order the merchandise on the internet.

We are all here on this board because we believe in that old, science fiction view of space travel, the wonder, the adventure, the possibilities. As much as we talk about privatization and free enterprise in space, the cruel physics and hard economics of orbital and interplanetary transport are not going to lend themselves to labor-intensive exploitation of the space frontier, we're going to send machines and we will primarily do those activities that are a high return on investment, not those that require pioneers and heroes.

I agree, if our robot probes image some weird shrub on an alien world, or if we find the ruins of an alien base out in the asteroid belt, we're going to wish human scientists and explorers were there to deal with the discovery, not a machine. But for the forseeable future we all know this is not likely to happen. I know, I know, we had to send men to service the Hubble, but now we're ready to abandon the Hubble, in spite of its past performance, precisely because we can't afford to send men to service it.

Personally, I still want to be that guy in the space suit with a wrench in his hand, fixing the oxygen scrubber, or photographing the lichen on the Martian stones. Now that I'm reconciled to not doing that, I still want to know someone in my future will do it when I'm gone. But we have to be realistic and stop thinking in those terms, or we risk losing space altogether. We have to commit ourselves to keeping the space program alive until the inevitable happens and we do find something out there that demands direct human intervention, manned missions, and yes, colonization. That day will come, it must, but it probably won't be during our lifetimes.