I grew up watching the Apollo missions to the Moon and dreamed of being the first person on Mars. The fickle nature of political leadership pulled NASA’s manned program in several different directions while the unmanned program brought the planets to our computer screens with missions to every planet in the solar system. The space station, proposed by Ronald Reagan in 1984 and redesigned more times than I care to think about, now looks like it will be finished in 2010, just in time for the space shuttle to be decommissioned and the United States to abandon its investment in it. We have endeared ourselves to our foreign partners after luring them into a joint international space station effort only to lose interest and stick them with the ultimate white elephant. I opposed the station 15 years ago, before any of it was built, because it seemed to be a pointless activity. Low Earth Orbit, where the station resides, is a tricky place to hang out, and there’s not much point for people to be there. At least the Moon is a place. Anyway, once the station was a reality I looked for ways to use it, and I was poised to be a part of two experimental programs on it, both studying the physics of small colliding objects to better understand the processes that lead to the formation of the planets. With NASA’s attention redirected to the Moon, my funding for those experiments was redirected back to NASA HQ.

So, NASA is heading back to the Moon, and there are some interesting scientific experiments I’d like to see on the lunar surface. We’ll see how that all works out over the next several years, but given that I don’t have an application in the astronaut pool, it seems unlikely that I’ll be taking any of those experiments there in person. I was resigned to my dream of being an astronaut remaining just a dream. Now, however, there appears to be the very real possibility of tourist flights to space. Initially, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two promises a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the Earth from 60-70 miles up for the tidy sum of $200,000. Several other firms (see here, for example) are working on rockets to offer similar rides for similar prices. Spaceship Two may fly within three years, which is frankly pretty amazing to me. I don’t have $200,000 in spare change, unfortunately, and it would really have to be burning a hole in my pocket for me to spend it on this ride. If and when private companies start offering orbital rides, instead of the hop up and down of Spaceship Two and its brethren, that would be a temptation, but certainly too expensive for those of us who tried to become astronauts by learning science. I guess I had it all wrong when I was a kid: I should have gone into the business world so I could make millions and get to space that way.