I've written about this extensively over the years (this, depressingly, is from almost a decade ago: https://t.co/4mnbzkPsvN), but the reason we didn't continue on from Apollo was that we did it the wrong way, the most expensive possible way, because of the "end of the decade"… https://t.co/BjXuPmKvgk
— Not-So-OK Boomer (@Rand_Simberg) April 2, 2026
“tethered to low Earth orbit”
At least that tether is supplied by Musk and his capitalistic Dragon program. If we’d relied on Apolloistic Boeing for the tether, the only way to go would be still be in a Soyuz.
Quite. Fortunately, by the “end of this decade” the ongoing transition from unaffordable governmentalism to private sector affordable abundance in space transportation should be all but complete and ready to kick into really high gear in the next decade. Then any members of the last two – not altogether unjustifiably – gloomy generations still inclined toward taking big chances for even bigger rewards “in the outer colonies” should be able to cinch up their big-boy pants and roll the dice as their ancestors did starting two centuries ago.
A sobering statement in Pinsker’s article is that nobody under the age of 55 ever witnessed the Moon landings. However, it’s worse than that. That means they were born within that era, not that they were cognitively able to understand what they were watching. The real age I put at about 63. So if you are less than 63 years old you were probably too young to understand what your parents were watching on TV if you remember it at all. Less than 55 and you wouldn’t even have had that experience. For you, it’s all just glossy photos in a history book or maybe you put up with the grainy slow-scan TV videos or the better color rover videos and the returned-from-the-moon color movie films on YouTube. How inspirational is that in the days of streaming media?
How do we get the young generation dreaming again? Does Doom scrolling kill the imagination?