A writer at large: Lost in Space ; George Bush has announced plans for Nasa once again to send men to the Moon, and then on to Mars. But GREG KLERKX believes the organisation has betrayed its early ideals and become a major obstacle to the dreams of a new

When I was a boy, I wanted to be an astronaut. It was an uncomplicated aspiration. I would ride the rocket and wear the spacesuit. I would gaze out through the fishbowl helmet into a star- flecked black ocean as the Earth spun blue-and-white below me. I would discover things. I would be a hero. These simple ideas formed the landscape of my ambition, one that seemed to hold limitless possibilities. It was a common dream, as mine was perhaps the first generation to have space incorporated into its earliest hopes with any real chance of achieving it. By the time I was old enough to have idols, astronauts were at the top of the heap.

Astronauts, of course, came out of Nasa – to a young boy, it was almost as if they were bred there like exotic plants. Nasa was where space began: it was a miracle factory, a glorious place somewhere in Texas or Florida that somehow translated science fiction into reality. It would be years before I understood that Nasa was a government agency created to fight a somewhat esoteric battle in the Cold War. Nasa’s political complexities may have been unfathomable to me, but its products – rockets, spaceships, interplanetary voyages – were immediately resonant.

For me, space was a synonym for adventure. As a boy born in 1963, space was imprinted on my child’s mind through the Apollo missions and Neil Armstrong -incredible, impossible Neil Armstrong, leaving us wide-eyed and gasping as we watched a soft powder of gray-white dust lift from the Moon’s surface as he planted that famous step. I was six years old, yet my memory of that moment is indelible. Had I known the word then, I would have called it surreal. Was he really not on Earth anymore? How could that be? When Huckleberry Finn announced his intent to “light out for the territory”, he spoke for every boy or girl who understood that the appeal of the unknowable there is simply that it isn’t here. Space travel gave new and tantalisingly infinite possibility to such a primal desire for adventure and escape: we could not only light out for the territory, we could leave the planet altogether. Each of the many times I’ve reread Huckleberry Finn, I’ve always imagined that in a different life Huck, too, would have wanted to be an astronaut.

In my youthful dreaming, it didn’t occur to me that I knew little about what astronauts actually did. But their appeal was not connected to the specifics of their job description: the spacesuit, the fishbowl helmet and the rocket were enough for me, much as the hat, the horse and the Colt were enough for boys of an earlier era. The tools of the astronaut’s trade, like those of the cowboy’s, embodied the dream – as did the enigmatic environment in which the dream became real. The Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry couldn’t have captured it more succinctly for an American boy: space was the final frontier.

By the time I was a teenager, the idea of becoming an astronaut was one of many imaginings that I had lifted skyward to see how it captured the light and then, for one reason or another, put away again. Talents began to shape dreams, rather than the other way around.

And yet I stayed close to the idea of space all of my life. I read science fiction avidly. I subscribed to science magazines and journals. I thrilled at each space shuttle launch and could rattle off the names of astronauts as others could those of sports stars. Whenever a science-fiction film opened, I had to be among the first to see it. In time, I found myself working in the space community and even with Nasa, albeit at a somewhat oblique angle: as a senior manager with the Seti Institute, a space research organisation based in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.

Seti – in its long form, the search for extraterrrestrial intelligence – employs a novel combination of sophisticated radio telescopes and high- end computing to scan nearby star systems for evidence of communications technology that might be the product of distant civilisations. For nearly two decades, Seti was a Nasa program: during that time, the agency spent more than $60m refining Seti instruments and search strategies. In the dog-days between the end of the Apollo program and the all-consuming focus on the space shuttle and the International Space Station, Seti was a bright spot for the agency. An endeavour rooted in solid astrophysics, Seti was light on Nasa’s budget even as it served as the inspirational ne plus ultra of many space dreamers: one is hard-pressed to name a work of science fiction, either in page or on screen, that doesn’t involve some sort of encounter with aliens.

Unfortunately, because of its pop culture ramifications, Seti science was frequently misunderstood and often derided as a taxpayer- funded hunt for “little green men”. The critics finally got their way in 1992 and Nasa’s Seti program was terminated. But Seti was soon revived with the support of private donors, and at the same time the Seti Institute struck an operational truce with Nasa. The agency has never again funded the search for intelligent life, but Nasa and Seti have coexisted for a decade (if sometimes uneasily) through a variety of related research and education projects deemed beneficial to both enterprises.

From the vantage point of the Seti Institute, I gradually came to see Nasa in a different light: not as a streamlined purveyor of space-faring know-how, but as a fractious bureaucracy roiling with politics and infighting, thick with red tape and feral self- interest. Even as this new perspective took hold, though, Nasa still seemed like the place where “space” began: through Seti/Nasa, I met astronauts, engineers and other Space Age legends who rekindled my boyhood dreams of space travel. Quietly, secretly, I found myself imagining with growing excitement that space might yet hold a place for me.

Not long ago, I visited friends who have three bright children. At the time, the oldest was six, the same age I was when I watched the first human walk on another world. In the long dance of sending him to bed, I visited his room. It was a place to warm my heart, filled with posters and photographs evidencing a love of space that I could immediately appreciate: brightly coloured cross-sections of stars and planets, Hubble telescope photographs of distant galaxies, the ubiquitous Eagle and Horsehead Nebulae in all their goggling scale, and more.

My friend’s boy knew far more about space and science than I did at his age. He could clearly describe the difference between “rocky” planets like the Earth and gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. He even knew how many planets had been discovered outside our solar system, and could explain the complex process by which astronomers searched for and ultimately discovered them.

Looking around his room and hearing the articulate, informed excitement of his words, I wistfully recalled my own Space Age dreams. Here was a boy who had the makings of an astronaut, who clearly loved space. In my mind there was nothing to keep him from blasting straight from the first grade to the dazzling horizon of my own youthful aspirations. High on the possibilities I envisioned for him, I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up.

“Maybe computers,” was his reply. Dismayed, I asked him about being an astronaut. He pursed his lips and shook his head. Unlike me at six, he had a very clear concept of what astronauts do these days: “They fly up in the shuttle and fix stuff”. His further lack of comment told me that this didn’t seem like much of a career to aspire to when stacked against the wild, wired world of computers.

In that moment, I saw his room anew. It was a place filled with “space” in the abstract. He was fascinated by the Voyager probes and by the 1997 Mars Pathfinder, which had provided the world with a virtual-reality taste of Mars – a precursor, many hoped, of the “real thing,” eventual human exploration. But human space exploration was notably absent in this room. There were no splashy posters of the space shuttle: nothing of Apollo or Mercury or Gemini. And there was not a single photograph of an astronaut.

In the weeks to come, I found myself returning to that encounter with increasing incredulity. In one generation, it seemed, the thrill of human space travel had faded. Modern astronauts were no longer bold explorers on the edge of the unknown. They had become high-priced handymen, anonymous to the world as they launched into space in expensive repair vans to service orbiting appliances; secondary to the machines they built and operated. Humans had ceased to be adventurers in space. Human spaceflight, it seemed, had ceased to be adventurous. Once, human spaceflight was the most exciting thing going; an edge of-the-seat marvel accomplished with slide rules, riveted steel, fire, bravery, and incredible ingenuity. Between 1961 and 1973, America alone managed 10 human missions beyond Earth orbit and landed men on the Moon – this before cell phones, the internet, personal computers, DVDs, or any number of other inventions we point to as evidence of living in the most modern of times. And yet, as of this writing, no human has travelled beyond Earth orbit in three decades. None of the world’s space programs, not America’s, not Russia’s, not Europe’s, not even up- and-comers like the Chinese or the Indians – have concrete plans to change that fact anytime soon. Here at the beginning of the 21st century, we look back wistfully, sometimes with mild shock, at an era of human space exploration whose promise seems to have evaporated.

Seeing the result of such diminished expectations through the eyes of a child was more than disheartening to me. It was distressing. It is arguably the case that human spaceflight, even in its diminished form, survives only on the strength of those generations who lived through the height of its influence: those who engineered it, paid for it, or in the case of my generation, whose very worldviews were shaped by it. I was born during the fevered race to the Moon; my parents were young adults who believed human achievement in space was vital to human survival on Earth. Implicit in such achievement was the unequivocal promise that all of us would one day get a chance to be part of it.

Such beliefs don’t exist anymore, at least not in terms of a broad cultural consensus. I write this only a few months after the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, lost in the course of a mission that few understood and few, to be honest, even knew was happening until its tragic end splashed across newspaper pages, television screens and websites around the world. With Columbia’s wreckage still smouldering, the chorus of critics calling for the immediate end to human spaceflight began its increasingly familiar refrain. Their rationale is often compelling: human spaceflight is expensive and dangerous, and it long ago ceased to serve the obvious purpose it did during the Cold War, even if in hindsight that purpose now appears callow. Robotic explorers are more cost- effective than human ones, satellites far more useful than space stations. The conclusion of such an argument is unambiguous: we don’t need humans in space anymore.

Despite such criticism, Nasa will survive Columbia just as it survived Challenger 17 years earlier. If nothing else, the shuttle program employs tens of thousands of people in critical congressional districts. Just as important, the International Space Station, the completion of which depends on the shuttle, employs tens of thousands more. Such pragmatics will ensure that Nasa’s human spaceflight program will continue.

But for how long? Without obvious purpose or popular connection, few enterprises last forever. The Apollo generations will give way, soon, to generations for whom human spaceflight is at best mildly entertaining and at worst, a burden. If human spaceflight does eventually cease, it is not hard to imagine history being rewritten altogether. Once humans stop going into space, how many years will pass – 50? 20? – before the popular consciousness becomes infused with the idea that human spaceflight, in any form, never happened at all? That may sound impossible, yet even now an astonishing number of people believe that the Moon landings – events that remain confined to the already yellowing pages of 20th-century history – were mere special effects engineered by Hollywood. To future generations, any surviving relics of human spaceflight may be imbued with the same mystic intent many people associate with the ruins of Stonehenge. What they achieved, how they were built and, critically, what they promised may be lost forever.

“There is always one moment in childhood,” Graham Greene once wrote, “when the door opens and lets the future in.” For me, and for millions of my generation, that moment was Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the Moon. The generations that arrived after that epic moment have not had the benefit of any human spaceflight milestone so profound and inspiring; instead, their defining events have been the loss of Challenger and now of Columbia. It is no wonder, then, that not only have the Apollo generations lost faith in the original promise of human spaceflight but subsequent generations have never been given reason to have such faith in the first place.

I am a child of the Space Age. I grew up believing in the power of aspiration, will and technology to lift humans off the planet and to a fundamentally new experience. I saw myself journeying into Earth’s orbit to attain a perspective on my life and my world that was, in the truest sense of the word, unique. I envisioned people of different nations and cultures working together to establish a meaningful presence – for research, adventure and even commerce in Earth’s orbit and on the Moon, and then heading to Mars and one day, perhaps, even beyond. I believed in the potential of such activities to improve the human condition.

All of these reasons – historic, personal, intellectual, emotional – are why, try as I might to ignore it, this space future is still the one I want.

To get there from here, one must necessarily determine at what point the future, or at least one concept of the future, became a thing of the past. What happened to the Space Age? And how do we get it back? Answering the second question depends largely on defining what the Space Age, at its core, was all about. Many would argue that we still live in the Space Age, and it cannot be denied that space ventures continue to produce tangible benefits for humanity. Man-made satellites allow us to communicate instantly across great distances and help monitor our planet’s environment (and also help us spy on unfriendly nations). Sophisticated robots have explored many of the worlds of our solar system, and orbiting space telescopes have imaged distant galaxies, adding immeasurably to our store of scientific knowledge about the cosmos.

Yet such inventions only make it true that we live in an era in which their presence in space informs our lives. They cannot change the fact that we no longer live in an age defined by space, which is how the term Space Age came to be coined in the first place. The Space Age was never really about probes or satellites. It was about humans in space.

The Space Age was a drive to push humans to the limits of their physical, intellectual and emotional ability in an environment that had taunted, challenged and inspired humanity – philosophers, scientists, artists – for millennia. It was about human beings travelling into space – physically, not by robotic or observational proxy. We thrilled at the Apollo launches because people, like us, were going boldly where no one had gone before. We mourned the loss of the Columbia and Challenger crews because real people, like us, had died in pursuit of something we might, in our braver moments, want to do ourselves. Certainly, unmanned exploration is an essential component of any sensibly organised space agenda. But whatever the merits of remotely controlled machinery, we are still a species for which direct experience, even if interpreted by another member of our tribe, is the spark that lights our imagination and spurs us to better ourselves.

My friend’s boy was emblematic of a world that no longer sees a human future in space: he does not, as I did, see himself living in a Space Age. One can hardly blame him. In the sour years following Apollo, vested interests solidified, vision took a back seat to convenience, and the drive for a cogent rationale for advancing a “human” space future disappeared altogether. Human spaceflight has continued, but it is unmoored to any larger cultural or even geopolitical agenda. As such, it cannot survive.

Above all else, then, I want to look unflinchingly at how and why such diminished expectations have come to pass and, importantly, point the way to rebuilding the dream of a more meaningful and engaging human future in space. Rather than waiting for our children to rescue that dream, we must instead hand it back to them in a way that inspires them to claim it for their own, even when we are gone.

The primary tools we have at hand – namely, the space shuttle and the International Space Station – are insufficient for the task. Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the explosion of Columbia, other than the human tragedy, was that it changed very few opinions about Nasa or its human spaceflight activities. Both should continue, the polls unanimously concluded, but with no more or less vigour than at present.

Any extreme response would have been preferable, had it been a rousing public cry to scrap the shuttle, a national drive to pump billions into a better spacecraft, or a top-level political campaign for a human mission to Mars. Any such consensus would have been a sign that human spaceflight mattered. But no such indignation was forthcoming. As defined by Nasa, human spaceflight remains lodged in the room of our collective consciousness like a middling work of art; its occasional contemplation provides mild pleasure, but it isn’t really anything to stir the soul.

Desire is the beginning of any endeavour, and so it was for human space travel; whatever the ideological drives of the era, the early space pioneers – Russian and American – burned with an urge to send humans into orbit, and then to the stars. Remarkable achievements occurred in astoundingly short periods of time: just prior to the beginning of the Apollo program, more Americans thought it was far more likely that mankind would discover a cure for cancer before anyone set foot on the Moon. After the Moon was achieved, people assumed that Mars would come next. After that, anything seemed possible.

It would be naive to claim that what became known as the Space Race was predicated primarily on exploratory zeal – without the Cold War, the Space Age as we know it would not have happened. How it happened, though, is just as important. The Soviet space program, while technologically impressive, was yoked to a harsh and unappealing socio-political agenda. While certainly not short on ideology, Nasa had a fundamentally democratic appeal. After all, Neil Armstrong’s first words upon stepping onto the Moon were not “That’s one helluva triumph for America.” Instead, it was one giant leap for mankind. And so it was to Nasa that the world attached its space-faring ambitions.

In the end, Nasa proved to have not only more money and superior technology than the Soviets (at least for reaching the Moon), it had a better long- range marketing strategy. As Apollo was ramping up, Nasa sold a two-fold promise to the world as the rationale for its long-term significance.

Part One of the promise was that Nasa would build upon the Apollo missions to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, then quickly move on to sending humans to Mars and eventually even further, as technology improved and experience informed science and engineering. Such efforts would be the beginning of an exploratory expansion not seen since European ships set out in search of better trade routes (and in space, there wouldn’t be indigenous people to contend with, at least not in our solar system).

Instead, caught in the web of the nationalist politics it was a product of, Nasa scrapped the Saturn Moon rockets for the space shuttle, a decision that ensured that human space travel would be bound to Earth’s orbit for three decades and counting. When the space station was announced in 1984, it was promoted loudly as the staging past for missions to Mars and, critically, the first outpost of an orbital commerce revolution that would create a busy hub of human enterprise around the planet. Those promises, too, were quickly unmasked as little more than hype: the station was built, first and foremost, to give the space shuttle something obvious to do.

In the face of such criticism, the typical default position of Nasa and its supporters is to cast the agency as the victim of a shortsighted political system that hacked and slashed at Nasa’s grand plans for the future. It’s not Nasa’s fault that the Space Age we have is so dull, goes the argument; it’s a lack of public will, a dearth of political leadership, and of course a lack of money. It is the fault of virtually every constituency you can name – except Nasa.

This argument holds water to a point. Apollo may have been a technological marvel, but it was surely a political creation. Only two months after the triumphant landing of Apollo XI, Nasa submitted to Congress and the White House an ambitious blueprint for space exploration that at its maximum tempo (meaning a lot of money spent in short order, as was done with Apollo) would have established a base on the Moon by 1978 and sent the first humans to Mars by 1981. This is a mind-whirling timeline given the turgid pace that actually came to pass, but considering that America had gone from lobbing grapefruit-sized satellites into orbit to landing men on the Moon in the course of about a decade, it seemed wholly realistic.

That such magnificent plans went nowhere is certainly due to a lack of political will at some level. But Nasa leaders then and now have been painfully aware that Apollo was, in political terms, both a means and an end: that Nasa wasn’t simply dismantled altogether after Apollo XI is a testimony to how deeply its success rooted itself into the popular consciousness. Unfortunately for Nasa, though, missions to Mars served no broad political purpose, nor did Moon bases. The retrospective face- saving position for Nasa is that such plans and timelines were too ambitious, and perhaps that’s the case. Then again, the early consensus about the Apollo missions was that sending humans to the Moon before 1970 was an impossible goal. Could an Apollo-level commitment have put humans on Mars only a decade after achieving the Moon? The truth is, we’ll never know.

After being stung repeatedly by the political system that created it, Nasa shifted its strategy from creating exciting agendas of exploration to squeezing itself into whatever political agendas already existed. In time, the agency became uncannily good at anticipating these agendas, tailoring Nasa programs to order in advance.

Whatever sympathy one might have for Nasa, what Nasa has never done is to fundamentally reinvent itself: what its political minders have never done is to insist on such reinvention. There has been no shortage of commissions, reports, analyses, congressional testimonies, speeches, and backroom briefings offering suggestions for Nasa’s overhaul. Most of these have attached Nasa’s future to greater interaction with the private sector and, particularly, the idea of regularising human space travel – Part Two of the original Space Age promise.

The idea of spaceflight as a defining shift in the human experience was predicated not on cheerleading, but on participation. The Space Age promised, in deed and in word, that everyone at some point would have a chance to fulfill the age-old dream of travelling into space. Nasa boasted that the space shuttle would not only revolutionise space flight, it would alter terrestrial transport by routinising point-to-point travel through space – New York to Paris in an hour, or less. Hilton was designing “spacehotels,” much like the one in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, while Pan Am signed up “space tourists” for spacecraft it planned to build with Nasa’s help. Pan Am had tens of thousands of takers, among them a popular Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan – who as President would green-light Nasa’s space station, perhaps in the secret hope that his children or grandchildren could make use of his ticket.

Even now, with the space shuttle in danger of becoming the Edsel of space transportation and the International Space Station little more than an orbital trailer home, many people would willingly risk money and life for space travel. In October 2002, an exhaustive study by the well-known space-industry analyst Futron found that if it were openly available today, human spaceflight would draw 15,000 customers willing and – critically – able to pay up to $100,000 for the experience. That tag is not much more than the cost of a guided climb on Everest.

This refers to a sub-orbital spaceflight: one that offers a few minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views, a flight that essentially goes up and down without achieving orbit – a feat roughly equivalent to Alan Shepard’s first Mercury flight more than four decades ago. Orbital spaceflights are necessarily more challenging and more costly. Still, the Futron poll suggested that at least hundreds, possibly thousands, of qualified and interested customers would exist even though the orbital price tag jumped into the millions.

The Futron poll reflects only North American interest. Yet similar polls in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and several other countries have yielded much the same results. All in all, this kind of enthusiasm for a more personal approach to human spaceflight has been remarkably consistent through at least a dozen such polls conducted over the past decade, even with potentially off-putting tragedies like the Challenger explosion. The most extensive poll conducted on the subject of popular human spaceflight, commissioned and funded by Nasa itself in 2001, was no different in its basic conclusions.

Needless to say, Part Two of the Space Age promise has failed to materialise. Human spaceflight has never moved past the status of a demonstration sport; none of the 15,000 people who might be going into space right now have done so, because the vehicles to carry them have not been built. Such vehicles have not been built because the bulk of the technology, funding and political influence needed to build them has been wrapped up in the shuttle and space station. In this two-headed albatross, Nasa and its chief contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, have what amounts to a state-sponsored market monopoly – with the market in this case being near-Earth human spaceflight. The situation is akin to one in which Microsoft became not only the owner and maker of every computer software program in the world, but also the owner and maker of every computer.

The typical Nasa spin on what is derisively dubbed space tourism is that it reduces the noble enterprise of human spaceflight to mere junketeering for the rich. However, that is only the most cynical perspective. Properly managed and encouraged, popular human spaceflight could serve as a means of engaging popular interest in space in a way that no Nasa project is able to do. Underlying Nasa’s reticence is its fundamental disdain for sullying the grand spaceflight enterprise with the brassy sheen of commerce, but this again is backward thinking. Was Charles Lindbergh any less an inspiration to millions because he was, to put it bluntly, an aerial privateer chasing a hefty cash prize? In that light, it is instructive to compare the different trajectories of popular human spaceflight and the commercial aviation industry. In 1935; not even 40 years after the Wrights pioneered powered flight at Kitty Hawk, Pan Am sent the Martin M-130 China Clipper into mail service across the Pacific. Passenger service followed the next year, flying an island-hopping route to Hong Kong that took several days. In 1939 Pan Am turned to the Atlantic, and on June 28 the Dixie Clipper carried 22 people from Port Washington, N., to Marseilles. The fare was $675 return, or about $4,000 today.

As routes expanded and drew more customers, airports, resorts and entire communities rose up to meet the need of what quickly became a thriving commercial industry. By the end of the Second World War, thousands of people travelled around the world regularly in machines that were, in their day, nearly as technologically complex and as risk-prone as today’s spacecraft. Today, millions of people travel by commercial airliner each day: a reality that would have been truly unbelievable for anyone living at the beginning of the 20th century. Human spaceflight has never melded government and free- market interests the way commercial aviation did, largely due to Nasa’s active disdain for such a fusion of ideas. The result is that human spaceflight now happens via expensive, overcomplicated, irreplaceable government-sponsored vehicles – or, in the case of Russia, in tiny metal pods that have changed little in nearly half a century. It’s as if aviation never moved past the barnstorming days of the early 20th century that so thrilled the public and made them eager to go along for the ride. (Lindbergh himself was a barnstormer before he was a transatlantic hero.) Had aviation never progressed beyond handcrafted vehicles operated by a small elite of crack pilots, no doubt the barnstorming crowds would have thinned out quickly.

Much like the turn-of-the-century aviation industry, the space industry has spawned a legion of entrepreneurs who believe that competition would improve both the cost and reliability of spacecraft, much as competition improved the cost and reliability of aircraft, automobiles and most other technologies once considered too risky for broader consumption. They are believers in both parts of the Space Age promise; importantly, they believe that achieving the goal of opening near-Earth human spaceflight would help realise Nasa’s plans for sending humans once again on great voyages of cosmic exploration. They want Nasa’s help; in return, they want to help Nasa.

But Nasa has failed to grasp the potential of popular spaceflight as a means of revitalising public interest in, and support for, the agency’s work. Perhaps this is the case because Nasa has never grasped that it has a responsibility for laying the groundwork for a broader private-sector space infrastructure that would allow popular human spaceflight to blossom. In fact, Nasa has worked against such a paradigm change whenever possible; a charge that is less surprising considering that the dawning of a near- Earth human- space travel industry would necessarily mean the end of Nasa’s virtual monopoly on human spaceflight. For all the billions of dollars spent, for all the media hype, for all the Nasa spin, it cannot be denied that we are no longer living in anything resembling what we thought would be the Space Age. There are no passenger spacecraft, no orbiting platforms for business or pleasure. There is no human spaceflight at all that anyone would call ordinary. No one has returned to the Moon; no human has gone to Mars. The human spaceflight programs that do exist are marred by foggy goals, ideological baggage and Rube Goldberg machinery.

Yet books are still written, films are still made, and energy (and money) is still spent on pursuing something bigger, something grander, than what has come to pass for humans in space. None of these efforts of the imagination see the future in terms of the present: in none of the hundreds of fictional accounts of the future I’ve read, watched or listened to does Nasa rule the galaxy, nor do the Russians, Chinese or Europeans.

The vision of a human future in space has always been just that – a human future. If the spark of such a future weren’t still alive, no one would continue to write about it, or give it much thought at all. But the clock is ticking: human spaceflight needs to turn a corner soon, or face being consigned to history or, worse, oblivion. Given that, the only way forward is to put away the past, tear down the paradigm we have saddled ourselves with, and start over. When that happens, who can say what might be possible? m

This is an extract from `Lost in Space: The Fall of Nasa and the Dream of New Space Age’ by Greg Klerkx which has just been published by Secker & Warburg at pounds 16.99