Quote:
Originally Posted by Littlearmies
A few years later as Apollo / Skylab wound down I read a book called "The High Frontier" by Gerrard K O'Neill about building habitats in space - it was pretty visionary for it's time - and for the last 40 years when I've been standing around waiting for the dog to do his business at night I've looked up at the moon. And wondered how it happened that our dreams got so small.
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I remember the big dreams that came after Apollo, with most people not even realizing there were supposed to be three more flights to the moon extending into 1975, then there were supposed to be bases, a space station, go to Mars, etc. The Space Shuttle that eventually flew was only a shadow of what it was envisioned to be. Robert Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King's assassination, Vietnam, and the Nixon administration knocked the wind out of this country, and when we got up again, we were all a lot more cynical.
I don't know that our global civilization will make it without a big, aggressive manned space program. And it's probably too late anyway. There's not enough room on the Earth for all of us already -- by 2050, there will be 10 billion of us human pests on this planet and its possible that because of global climate change the Earth will only be able to support 2 billion.