We require, as a species, the difference between what is safe and unsafe to define ourselves. Be it in darkness or in light, where we are means nothing without the comparison to the other place - where we are not. And thus it is the difference between them that tells us who and what we are.
— Rick Tumlinson
We face fear many times a day, in many ways, and usually we turn away from it. It often hides itself behind laziness and complacency, which are its shadows and aliases. We accept the things-as-they-are world in which we are comfortable.
I do not expect NASA to go out and build settlements and colonies. I do not expect them to give SpaceX all the money needed to colonize Mars. I do not expect them to realize the future of humanity is contingent on harvesting the wealth of the solar system overnight and suddenly subsidize my asteroid mining project.
There was nothing technical or physical stopping us from having moved on from Apollo to a permanent Moonbase, the development of industries in space, and the establishment of the first human communities on Mars. We could have - we can - do it anytime we actually decide that it is our goal, organize ourselves to make it happen, and Just Do It.
I've been doing a few interviews since the loss of the SpaceX Dragon on its way to the Space Station. Each one very quickly questions the viability of what they call commercial space in light of the failure. I tell them space is hard: this is what happens early in a program with new technology.
China, Russia and India are shooting for the Moon. United Arab Emirates says Mars. Other private citizens and companies are heading either to Mars, asteroids, or the Moon.
Government paved the on-ramp to space. Now, the vehicles taking us up to the space highway are being built by citizens, leveraging off government-catalyzed technologies and needs.
Your birthday happens each year on exactly the same day. It is a solid thing, a dependable thing, a measure of your life broken down into 365 subunits. For a Leaper, it is a bit different. For us, the basic assumption is shattered from the beginning.
If governments decide to return to the Moon - as seems to be the case - it must be to build villages, not bases, and to do it as rapidly as possible, as it needs to be an immediate challenge, not a distant dream. And if some want to go to Mars or mine asteroids, they need to be seen as part of a new frontier community.
Robotics, manufacturing, medicine, farming, energy - all will be pushed to and beyond their limits and, by so doing, will advance at speeds far faster than without the impetus and challenge of opening a frontier - thus also raising the odds of survival in our favor.
Our greatest theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, recently declared that humans have no more than a hundred years to get off this planet to ensure the survival of our species. And when someone such as he does so, it is with an understanding not just of the science, but of both our tenuous place and our possibility in the universe.
We often mistake the artificial chemical and psychological thrill of fake edges for the real. In fact we often seek them out as a substitute for the reality of change, growth and exploration. Our minds and bodies help us in this, as they react much the same to this simulations as to the real world.
There are moments in time when the coincidence of art and reality interact to allow us a glimpse into the context of history. The release of the Christopher Nolan film 'Interstellar' a few days after two catastrophes in our space endeavor gives us one of those moments.
Space is big. The whole point of the frontier is that we go there to do new things in new places - not one place, and not one thing, but all of the above.
From the moment those images of Buzz and Neil arrived on the world's television sets, our human space program has been lost - for a blatantly simple and obvious reason - after the first giant leap to take that first small step, there was no plan for the next one, because there was no second question to be answered.
All the best to SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and, yes, the Progress teams, who are all working on their own solutions to open the frontier along with Boeing and the rest of the fliers trying to fly, all of whom I know personally share the dream. This isn't their fault; they just want to make things fly.
We go to learn about our solar system, to search for life, and to understand what happened to Mars so we avoid it ourselves.
Government should support - and benefits from - economic development and settlement. The oft-used analogy of building highways and supporting infrastructure - not driving the vehicles or the industry - fits.
I am a Leaper: a person who - thanks to some mathematical errors tied to the cosmic interactions of Earth and Sun and bad math on the part of some old timers long ago - is lost in time, born on a day that simply doesn't exist three out of four years.
We are threatened by long-unresolved issues between the melting pot of cultures that make up our nation. People are isolated, every day less united, and every day falling deeper into a new level of cultural despair.
To settle space, we will have to develop the ability to harvest and utilize the resources of the solar system, such as ores, ice, and the rays of the sun itself at levels of efficiency that will transform our relationship to our own planet Earth.
We do not become an astronaut because we fear not only the risk of space, but we fear the risk of failure along the way more than we want to put in the work to make it happen - and it is easier not to try.
From John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, presidents have rhetorically opened the door to the frontier for us, and each time, we have turned away to fight over destinations, technologies, and timing.
We cannot wait for the next Kennedy to set us on our path to the stars.
When President Kennedy set us on a path to the Moon in the 1960s, he knew exactly why - to produce a photo-op that would clearly show America would be the winner in the decades-long battle of political systems called the Cold War.
Governments spending billions on a humans-to-Mars program won't allow wild-eyed billionaires to steal the glory; all heck will break loose as the public and sidelined governments decry and block the perceived cosmic land grab. Yet the private folks aren't waiting.
Support space-resource and industrial infrastructure. Multibillion-dollar satellites or voyagers to Mars and beyond, if we don't live off the land, we will always only be visitors or wire stringers in territories we do not inhabit or control.
We are as old as we feel. And while I never feel my calendar age, I often feel my Leaper age. And I'll go with that. Because life is not something to be run down like a counter nor counted as it runs you down. It is an experience, and we can choose to live it as we will.
It was Apollo 8 that first showed us the tiny blue marble of Earth floating in the void of space, one of the great psychological shifts in human history. From out there, we can both appreciate and begin to solve the problems of our world in ways unavailable to us otherwise.
On July 20th, 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took the most expensive selfie in history. As the apex of an 8-year, $130 billion effort, they posed in front of a camera and took a shot designed to do one thing - to show our free enterprise democratic system was better than the rigid, authoritarian system that wanted to destroy us.
To establish human settlements on the Moon, Mars, or in the free-space between, humans will have to again rapidly adapt. Like early pioneers, there will be no nearby friendly merchants or supportive governments to replace that broken tool.
