Space.

What the Hell happened? Y'got cornflakes for brains or what?

I should be typing this on the Moon. I should have either taken the beanstalk up to Apogee Station (cheapest way up, even if riding it is creepier than Hell) and then taken one of the boost shuttles to Serenity and then down on a VTOL ship, or I could have paid top dollar, gotten in one of the liners, and boosted up, pressed into my chair just like Aldrin and Armstrong and Collins did. More expensive, but you get there faster and the ride is incredible. TWA got that spin trick down too, so now even Southwest will give you an approximation of gravity as you coast up. Not a lot of gravity, but enough to keep your food down. And the center of the liner is the place you go to bounce around in microgravity and listen to the kids laugh, and some shmuck always brings along a can of coke which sprays everywhere, but what the Hell?

And here I would be, typing in an entry to be batch sent to Earth along with the rest of the electronic communications, and you would receive it on the 24th through part of an automatic update I'd have on a cron job on my server. Or else I'd just e-mail the html to Eileen on the ground and she'd update it for me.

Instead, no one's been on the moon in double digits of years, and there's no way I can make it in my lifetime. Why? Because politicians see the next election more than they do the next generation, and because people who don't or can't believe and who can't or won't think don't do their primary job, which is getting the Hell out of the way of those of us who do.

Well, the believers will win, sooner or later. There's too much money out there not to. There's too much hope down here to keep it down forever. The beanstalk will get built along the equator. Maybe four of them will be built eventually, all on the cardinal points, and from the furthest point of the spaceward hook you'll be able to see three of them. The folks at the Artemis project are waiting, and collecting funding, and putting their faith in... sooner or later, the cost of materials and the cost of boosting will drop. Right now, there are more private launches than governmental launches every year. It's getting so comparatively cheap to throw satellites in orbit that they're running out of room to put them along that mystical 22,500 mile "geosynchronous orbit" plane. The Mars mission will help, because it will focus us outward... the Martian Rover of a few years back put people back in a good mood about NASA, helping to erase the pain of Challenger. And Challenger reminded us how brave and ultimately heroic our Astronauts really are, and that's not a bad thing.

And, frankly, sooner or later the politicians will die, and politicians from a generation that actually knows with the certainty of Manifest Destiny that mankind will rise off this world and take over space will take over the government -- not just our government, but Tokyo and Germany and the United Kingdom and China and Russia and all the rest -- and then humanity won't know how we ever thought we could live on this mudball without ever raising our eyes up.

Will I be alive to see it? I dearly hope so. Will I get to go?

No.

I've missed the golden ring and I know it. Even if travel got cheap, it wouldn't get cheap enough and I'm too heavy, and my skills are too easily reproduced. By the time commercial flights will be cheap enough that any bonehead like me can go, I'll be too old. Maybe even for the beanstalk.

But I can dream, and I can hope, and I can wish.

Wishes are where it all started, with me. This is a memory of my mother's. I was a big Star Trek fan as a kid -- by kid I mean six years old. I assume it was the beaming and the adventure that I loved, because the stories weren't really parsable by me (I assume. Though I don't remember having problems.) This was when we lived down on Alfred Street, in a duplex my Dad used through the University. A big old house that I remember fondly, destroyed later because it was in a flood plain. I watched them tear it down, though we hadn't lived there for years.

And it had a good yard and a fun neighborhood, and we had big trees and fields nearby. And I would go out and play in the trees and fields with other kids, or by myself. I never had a problem being by myself. My fantasy life was rich and full and wonderful. Star Trek was a part of it.

I remember being in Alfred Street when I watched Astronauts walking on the moon. I assume it was one of the later missions -- I was one year old when Apollo 11 landed, even as I'm thirty-one years old now. But I do remember their big suits, their video tape, their big bowl helmets. And I remembered Star Trek.

My mother remembers all this too, and she remembers hearing me sing the Wishing song one night, when I didn't know she was there. You know the song....

What really struck Mom's notice was my wish. I mean, kids wish for things all the time, usually in department stores. But this time, six years old and staring in the sky, and believing with all my heart that the Wishing Song would work, I wished for Star Trek to be real.

"What struck me," Mom told me years later, "is that you didn't wish to be on the Enterprise. You just wanted it to be real. You wanted the Enterprise out there. You wanted to know those people were out in space, exploring it."

I still wish that, when I look up at the stars tonight. I won't get to go, but I wish the rest of you could. I wish you were up there right now. Exporing, exploiting, making cash, making breakthroughs, birthing babies, burying your dead, and expanding the human race outward, even as we've always done here. Someday, it will happen. I wish that day were today.

But, as I said at the beginning of the essay, some folks out there got cornflakes for brains. They want the same world they were born in, and they resent and fear change. And so they cut funding for it, because they figure it's not money well spent.

But their world is already dead. The fact that I can post this on the Internet proves that. No matter how much they want to turn back the clock, progress moves forward and the world gets different every day. And sooner or later, they'll die too, and maybe we can get some work done then.

We'll see. In the meantime, I'll keep wishing and I'll keep voting, and maybe one of the two will make the difference.