The Stars My Destination
I had no idea that NASA's new Crew Exploration Vehicle had a "name," but it does: Orion. Sweet! In the proud tradition of Project Mercury, Project Gemini, and Project Apollo, we have now embarked upon Project Constellation, at long last the resumption of the manned exploration of our solar system. Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt, the LEM astronauts of Apollo 17, departed from the Moon in 1972, thirty-four years ago. That is thirty-four years too long for Man to have been shackled to the earth (and low Earth orbit). Make no mistake, I love Earth, Earth is the crucible which forged the glory of Man, but I believe our destiny (though I don't believe in the concept of destiny/fate, you know what I mean) is to be found among the stars.

I have had since I was a boy a battered die-cast toy of the Space Shuttle. It is one of my most prized possessions. But in the real world the entire Space Shuttle venture was a distraction for which we paid a high price in blood (the fourteen souls lost aboard the Challenger and the Columbia), treasure, and time. The very name says it all, the Space Shuttle. What, like a shuttle bus? There's no romance in the word shuttle. We need to put the romance back in manned space flight. (Which is not to say we should not also pour our energy and treasure into unmanned space flight; Opportunity and Spirit are marvels of American ingenuity.) Mercury! Gemini! Apollo! Orion! Those are names to go boldly where no man has gone before.

We are still at least half a decade away from the first flight of an Orion spacecraft, but in the meantime we have at last turned our eyes once again to the heavens. Huzzah! Or in the vernacular, woot! And now I leave you with the opening lines of the prologue to Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination:

"This was a golden age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it."