The Phenomenauts, "Man Alone" from For All Mankind (The Last Angry Spaceman)
Captain's Log: In watching a mostly disappointing television special ostensibly about the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope—but that spend precious little time on the technical details of the Webb & far too much in arrogant, dime-store philosophizing—an astronaut who'd flown five missions on the Space Shuttle, including three service missions to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, offered that he would happily leave the earth forever on a generation ship (Wikipedia-link) to an extrasolar planet (or "exoplanet"), even though only his grandchildren or great-grandchildren would ever see the alien world. That's a bold statement. (Or maybe not; it could be an idle boast given the current limits of manned spaceflight, but I for one take the man at his word.)
It is a statement made in confidence that we are all in this together, that when Neil Armstrong set first set foot on the Moon it was indeed, in his eloquent words, "one giant leap for Mankind." It was not solely his triumph, it was out triumph—even mine, though I would not be born for another decade. Whenever we develop interstellar spaceflight, whether through faster-than-light propulsion, suspended animation technology, or generational spacecraft, the bond that connects all of us will not be severed, not even by nigh-unbridgeable celestial distances. We on the good earth will still be connected to those on strange new worlds. We will miss them & they will miss us, even as we remain committed to our separate courses. As the plaque attached to the descent stage of the lunar module reads, "They came in peace for all Mankind." As it was then, so it is now, & so must it always be.
"All of us,
We should have a mission,
We should have a purpose,
It's in our bones.
What's a man
If he has no ambition?
A truncated vision.
He's a man alone.
(He's a man alone!)
"This is the story of a generation,
An ageless nation. Are we alone?
The days and weeks have started bleeding,
We're in dire need of something bold.
"All of us,
We should have a mission,
We should have a purpose…"
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