Jay Manifold has a sobering coda to my Wrightathon.

On this anniversary, half a million people will be in the air in this country alone at any given moment.

For comparison, on the fortieth anniversary (12 April 2001) of the first manned space flight -- a period of breakneck technological and economic advances -- there were exactly three human beings in space, the Expedition Two crew of Usachyov, Voss and Helms aboard the International Space Station.

I've probably mentioned this anecdote before -- perhaps here, perhaps elsewhere.

My father was a college student in the early to mid 30s -- three decades after the first Wright flight. He got a summer job in Chicago at the World's Fair then. He did fairly well that summer. So well that he actually bought a ticket and FLEW home. Let me make the contrast with today's space flight even more striking. When Pop was in high school, he suffered a football injury. A bone in his leg became infected. To "cure" the illness, doctors eventually had to operate, removing the infected bone and replacing it with platinum. Well, my father still kept the use of the leg and was only very mildly handicapped.

Today there are just two ways to get into space. One, be intelligent, well educated in certain fields and a physically damned near perfect specimen. Two, have piles of money and buy a ticket.

If someone like my father said he'd like to take a trip in space, the response of the establishment would likely be much laughter. The upstarts behind things like Spaceship One would, I suspect, be far more understanding, but admit they weren't there yet -- although that was their eventual goal.

The lack of progress in space for ordinary people is a damning indictment of the aerospace establishment. And, I think, it's one of the reasons why support for space is a mile wide, but an inch deep.

Consider this: when people discuss launching a communications satellite or a remote sensing satellite or a spy satellite, factors considered are normal business or military considerations. Political support just isn't a high priority. That's because the broad mass of the public sees the current value of doing such things. The high profile stuff is just entertainment to them. Entertainment is worthwhile, but not if it costs literally billions per program.

Our current situation with aeroplanes isn't anything to write home about either.

I seriously doubt the Wright brothers ever imagined, in their most pessimistic and dystopian dreams, that 100 years after their historic flight, the skies would still be nearly empty and nearly everyone would still be doing nearly all of their traveling in groundcars.