When I was five or six years old, I wanted to be an astronaut. Space:1999 was the coolest TV show ever in my book (yeah, well, the taste of a six year old is never to be underestimated). I used to read, and re-read, articles on Apollo 17 and the Skylab missions in a couple of old National Geographic magazines. Pop-Tarts never tasted so good as when eaten at 5 a.m. while watching the rockets launch for the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
Those were the waning days of America's outer space heroes, just a few years after Armstrong set foot on the moon.
Today, President Obama outlined a dream for sending astronauts to Mars and to the asteroids beyond, making up for his cancellation of President Bush's dream of sending men back to the moon and the Constellation project.
It has been said by several scientists that the exploration of space is best accomplished with unmanned spacecraft. And those scientists would be correct. One need only look at the success of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, operating years beyond their design life, for an example. The Voyager spacecraft, launched not too long before the first Space Shuttles took flight, continue to send signals back to Earth.
Yet there is something that still sparks the excitement of the nation when humans are sent to explore and experience these uncharted worlds for themselves. They can't possibly collect the data and information their robotic counterparts can, but they can give us a feeling -- the one thing that truly separates us from our computer driven creations -- of what it is like to set foot on a strange world, so far from our own.
And maybe this new drive into outer space will inspire more six-year-olds to dream of touching the stars.
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