Space Dreams with the NSS

This week, I was to speak at the National Space Society’s annual conference and awards ceremony. Instead, I will pre-record my remarks and so will Apollo 11 and 13 astronauts, so hopefully it will be something all the more interesting! But first, we are off to the Cape to watch the historic return to space for America. One of the astronauts, Doug Hurley, was on the last U.S. launch of the Shuttle, also from Pad 39A nine years ago.

Of all the books on space history that I have read, my favorite passage of all is the closing of Andrew Chaiken’s A Man on the Moon in 1994 (long before the founding of SpaceX, and the year before Elon’s first startup Zip2):

“I want us to do justice to the magnificence of the adventure that Apollo began. To live up to the promise not only of what we can achieve, but who we can become. And once we are living on the moon and venturing out across the solar system, the fact that we waited so long to resume our explorations will hardly matter. Historians of the far future may look back on Apollo and the missions that are yet to come as one great Age of Space Exploration. But in my mind’s eye it is a slow dissolve, from memory to anticipation, from what has been to what will be, from dream to dream.”

With an ever-growing sense of anticipation…
Here’s my flickr album of 14 years of SpaceX photos and my Apollo-era artifacts at work