Can Man Reach the Stars

I wonder if mankind will ever get to the point where they can reach out to the other planets and the stars? Most efforts to that effect have been being done by private corporations in the last couple of decades, but now with the Artemis program, talk about reviving NASA seems to be turning into action, just like in the old days. How well I remember the early days of the “space race” between the United States and the USSR. The Russians beat us to the punch with “Sputnik” and the first man in outer space was Yuri Gagarin…back in April of 1961. Our first man in space was Alan Shepherd, who launched a month behind the Russians on May 5th of 1961.

President Kennedy stood before America only 20 days later and said: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. “What a leader he was. And so we were off and running, and on July 20th 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. No other country has ever put a man there since. We have gone through fifty years since then, with other programs taking the place of “deep space” travel. The Space shuttle program…the space station. All of that was exciting, but not something which would serve to inspire the soul. Reaching out past our planet into the unknown is something exciting. With programs like Artemis, humanity seems to be pointed out towards the depth of space again. Away from the Earth, out into the unknown and unknowable. Out to perhaps one day having humanity set foot on another world. I’m a lifelong reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I loved Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. I also liked less well known authors also, like Frank Herbert and later on Orson Scott Card. But it was mainly Heinlein who really put the reader out there amongst the stars. I really “grokked” his books.

This morning as I looked out at the stars in the bright but dark sky, I thought of a quote I had read from author Norman Cousins, who became famous for “laughing” himself back to health: To be able to rise from the earth; to be able, from a station in outer space, to see the relationship of the planet earth to other planets; to be able to contemplate the billions of factors in precise and beautiful combination that make human existence possible; to be able to dwell on an encounter of the human brain and spirit with the universe—all this enlarges the human horizon . . .— Norman Cousins, 1973

Hopefully soon, the United States, and perhaps the entire world will again take its first baby steps towards a hopeful ultimate destiny of reaching the stars and the planets surrounding them, and “going where no man has gone before.”