The SpaceX Starship IFT-6 test flight on November 19, 2024. Original video source: @SpaceX on X.
Space, the final frontier …
When the first Star Trek episode aired on September 8, 1966, NASA’s Project Gemini was nearing its end. Ten missions had been completed, with the eleventh flight scheduled to launch four days later from what was then called Cape Kennedy.
That geographical feature, originally named Cape Canaveral, had its name changed one week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The president visited the Cape on November 16, 1963, six days before his murder in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon Johnson, his successor, renamed Canaveral for Kennedy.
Gemini was to prepare the American government’s space program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy had proposed just such a quest, on the floor of Congress, on May 25, 1961. That quest eventually became known as Project Apollo.
This decadal quest inspired a new generation of science fiction, at times overlapping with Star Trek. The landmark science fiction series inspired future generations to create the Star Trek future, joining NASA or commercial space enterprises.
It was that inspiration that put me on the track towards space advocacy, through grassroots such as the National Space Society and The Planetary Society, and later as a lecturer and educator at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida.
A Star Trek future is, what we say in the space biz, aspirational.
But to make that future happen, we have to act through the reality of our present political system.
Among my career experiences are various stints in political consulting, working on various campaigns, some partisan, some not. My college degree is political science (there’s nothing scientific about politics), with an advanced masters degree in public administration. I’ve also worked as a government bureaucrat.
When my wife and I moved from California to Florida in 2009, the Space Shuttle program was nearing an end. I was mystified by roadside protests I saw near KSC, union members waving signs accusing President Barack Obama of ending the space program. As a space advocate, I knew this was untrue, but I wondered why unionists were only now protesting a decision made six years earlier by this president’s predecessor.
As I engaged with the public — not just Americans, but guests from around the world — I found I was not alone in asking these questions. I spent the next ten years answering them, not just for me but also for you.
That’s what the Space Pundit is all about.
I’m retired now, so I’m going to write about space politics, policy, and history. We are in a Golden Age of space technology, as the United States shifts from a socialist government space program to one where the government facilitates commercial space enterprise — the name, after all, of our fabled starship.
As one president’s administration comes to an end, and another one is about to begin, this seems to be a good time for us to begin a dialogue about where we are, how we got here, and where we’re going.
By “we,” I mean not just you and me, not just Americans, but humanity.
If you subscribe to this Substack feed, we can boldly take this journey together. As well as split infinitives.