Where's my Moonbase?

About the middle of 2010 the space shuttle is set to amble into history and none too soon for me.

I was twelve in 1981 when Crippen and Young piloted the Columbia into space for the first time. At this point in my life, I was still running home from school so I could get there in plenty of time to watch reruns of the original Star Trek (4 pm every weekday!) so I was suckered in by the space shuttle program like the rest of my generation. The space shuttle was and still is a remarkable piece of technology but in a not-at-all-stunning display of why government cannot and should not run things, NASA's bureaucracy took a step backward with one of the most incredible vehicles ever built.

Inside of a single decade the early space program went from barely achieving a stable orbit to a trip to the moon. We then repeated that miracle several more times and built a space station to boot - all before 1975 (about the time I started watching Martin Landau and crew living on Moonbase Alpha in Space:1999). By 1981 we had seen Star Wars and the first Star Trek movie. That initial launch of the space shuttle gave my entire generation (Gen X) hopes that ours would be the first to whom space would be open to ordinary people. Some of us still might be able to visit there thanks not to NASA but to 'evil capitalist' billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic project.

This year marked the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Forty years after the Wright brothers first flight, planes were dozens of times faster and ready to break the sound barrier. Forty years after Neil Armstrong became the most famous person on earth, we aren't sure NASA has retained the technology to get us back to the moon. Much of that is because of a change in NASA at about the same time the space shuttle got off the ground where it stopped being run by normal humans and and control was ceded to bureaucrats (the species Homo Bureactratis prove Darwin wrong as they are an evolutionary step backward from Homo Sapiens).

Thus even while we were cheering the new era of space travel, NASA's horizons shrank from the outer planets, Mars, and even the moon back to low orbit around the Earth. The tragedy of the Challenger turned them even more timid and the space shuttle fleet itself became little more than a delivery truck into orbit.

I feel pretty cheated. By this time in my life I expected to be able to look into the sky with good binoculars or a small telescope and see lights from humanity's first permanent base on another world. At the very least, we should have partially completed a space station along the lines of the one in they had in the dreadfully horrid 2001: A Space Odyssey. Good grief!!! I even had the plan. We could have launched a dozen or so regular rockets with building material to the moon over the course of a couple of years while the space shuttle was used to build a transport ship in orbit. It could have even been nuclear powered since the main vehicle would be a ferry between earth and lunar orbit (no risk of releasing radioactive material in a landing). Once enough stuff was landed on the moon a team of engineers would go put up the surface buildings and start digging since a base on the moon would be much safer if most of it was below ground. Over the course of two decades it might even have resembled Moonbase Alpha a little bit. But alas, the dunces in charge at NASA barely got a near-sighted telescope into space.

Like any other bureaucracy NASA now has billions of dollars swallowed up in graft, red tape, dead end projects, and corporate waste; billions that should have been tech labs, observatories, and living areas in the moon base. Billions that should have been constructing a ship on the moon ultimately destined to take the first humans to Mars. George W Bush tried to give a Kennedy-esque speech urging us on to Mars but it fell on deaf ears at NASA. The public may have cheered but NASA replied through its cadre of "Nattering Nabobs of Negativsim".

I don't expect us to get back to the moon anytime soon. My moon base exists in the same place that my flying cars do and wherever that is, it isn't any drawing board at NASA.