Space – the final frontier (Where is it?)

With the coming of the new year, we are now more than a decade and a half into the 21st Century.  Our lives have changed significantly since this same time last century.

We can point to thousands of gadgets which make our life easier, and we can point to hundreds of inventions and ideas that have advanced us into the digital world, and connected us to places we’ve never been connected before.

In some ways, our lives are like the old Jetson’s TV show.  We have many labor saving devices.  We have machines to do much of the mundane laborious work.   We have self-driving cars and we are well on our way to developing robots which can make our life even easier.

It’s in space where we’ve made our greatest strides and it’s in space where we’ve fallen down.   As a kid growing up, we just knew the 21st Century would bring us space travel and intelligent life elsewhere in our universe.   But, it hasn’t happened.  The desire, the cost, the inability of some to think about the future, has put our space program in limbo.   Others think we have made great strides.

We’ve sent men to the moon nine times and landed them six times.   We’ve established a permanent space station in Earth orbit that is constantly stocked with new scientists and new ideas.  We have sent robots and vehicles to Mars, moving about the Mar’s surface, beaming back pictures.

We’ve sent rockets to every planet in our solar system and took pictures of them all, including many of their moons.

We have at least three private commercial companies building rockets, sending satellites into space and planning ventures to the moon and to Mars.   We have hundreds of satellites in near Earth orbit enabling us to keep in constant communication and to know our location within inches.

While the 21st Century isn’t as far along as we envisioned – – it will be.  All it takes is vision, commitment and money.   What we  really need is a new space race like the one we had between the United State and the Soviet Union, which resulted in the US landing a man on the moon.

Maybe the new space race will be between the United States and China over who will land a crew on Mars.

But, what I really want is the flying car I was promised half a century ago.