Saving our space program: the Free Frontier

I’m a child of the space program. As a kid in the 60s, I lived for those days when the rockets would take off from Cape Canaveral/Cape Kennedy and head for the stars. My parents would even let me stay from school on the day of a launch, figuring I’d learn more watching the lift-off than I would miss by playing hooky for one day. I had the whole launch sequence memorized and knew all the stages of the rockets and all the names of the men riding them. The voice of Mission Control was the Voice of the Future and the Age of Super-Science.

And when you add in movies like Forbidden Planet, The Thing, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, or TV shows like Star Trek, I was convinced back then that I’d one day be taking family vacations at Disneyland-Mars.

Boy, was I wrong.

Soon after that glorious moment when Man —Americans— first walked on an alien world, NASA became a space taxi-cab service and then decayed into a tool of the global-warming scam and a vehicle for bolstering Muslim self-esteem. Now, with the last shuttle flight, we can’t even take ourselves into space, anymore. We have to hitch a ride from… the Russians. How the mighty have fallen.

As you can imagine, that little boy still somewhere inside me was scuffing his toes and pouting.

In recent years, though, I’d become intrigued with the possibilities of space exploration as a private enterprise. The Wright brothers-like exploits of Burt Rutan showed the way, but I hadn’t realized until very recently just how big the private space-flight movement was and how far it had come along, and what hope it held for reviving an American space program.

All of which serves as a long-winded introduction to the following video from Bill Whittle, the Free Frontier:

That little boy is cheering again.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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