Posted
11:40 pm
by Ken
The Man Who Sold the Moon
I've just been interviewed for Wired News about George W. Bush's speech at NASA, which I'd watched an hour or so earlier. I was flattered to be asked, and I hope Charlie Stross gave a better impression of an SF writer who is clued up on all this space rockets stuff. Seriously, I don't follow space policy in any depth. I don't, for example, know if Bush's way of finding the money by shifting $11 billion worth of existing NASA priorities and giving the agency an extra $1 billion over five years is open-handed, tight-fisted, or cack-handed.
I do know this. Watching it felt like science fiction coming true, and in a good way. Complete the space station. Replace the Shuttle. Build a Moon base. Learn more stuff. Go to Mars. And then what? Worlds beyond. A human presence across the Solar System. And then what? 'Humanity is going out into the cosmos.'
A feasible beginning, a reasonable progression, and no prospect of an end. This what the Space Age was supposed to be like.