NO RETURN TO THE MOON IN OUR LIFETIME

Healthy skepticism about the possibility of man's return to the Moon is the theme of this story in The Boston Globe.

Simply put, great exploration is driven by the quest for knowledge, sure, but it is funded by the drive for wealth and power. The great exploratory expeditions of history were usually funded by governments or private companies in order to steal a march on a competitor, or acquire resources. The reason the world was explored by Europeans (and the reason the Europeans eventually colonized and dominated across the globe) is because they were involved in an intense, and oftentimes violent, confrontation with each other over wealth, resources and power. Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Dutch explorers sailed forth from their continent and opened up new worlds not because they desired to expand mankind's horizons, but because they were dueling with each other for the wealth of the world, in order to use that wealth to achieve dominance over their rivals. In the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. was involved in a great global competition with the Soviet Union for wealth and power, which led each side to attempt to outdo the other in space exploration. When the Soviets took the lead with the first satellite, Sputnik, America was terrified. Then the Russians put the first man in space, and in orbit. This led to the frenzied push for space exploration, and the goal of beating the Russians to the Moon. Once it was done, and it became apparent the Russian space program had failed miserably at their own attempt to go to the Moon, there was no longer any incentive to spend the money to go farther, so the Moon program was cancelled, and we were left with an agency, NASA, without a purpose. So, like every good government bureaucracy, they kept inventing new missions for themselves to keep members of Congress happy enough to keep funding them.

Well, the party may be over. While their might be great wealth and resources in space, it is monstrously expensive at the moment to get at them and exploit them. Only a government can raise the funds necessary for the exploratory expeditions, or the expeditions that would follow to exploit the resources once discovered. There is no political will, or international competitive environment, to drive such funding at the present time. I hate to be so pessimistic, but there it is. As they said in that fine movie about the early space program, The Right Stuff, "No bucks, no Buck Rogers".