"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you will land among the stars."
The famous words of Les Brown are appropriate in, perhaps, a more literal sense than most when dealing with space exploration. One dream Americans have always had revolves around the mystery of the stars. Everyone stares at them during some point in their life and wonders what is up there. Everyone knows of the days of those beautiful Saturn V rockets. Back when we shot for the moon, and made it.
Some Americans wonder what happened to those days. Why are we reduced to smaller rockets and relatively short range shuttles? Why have no more than 400 humans been in space? Why have we not put a man on the moon in nearly thirty-five years? It's because the money's not there. Ever since the end of the Cold War both the government and the general populace have continuously lost interest in outer space. This country cannot allow this to continue. Without continued space exploration the United States and society as a whole will become complacent, decadent, and eventually collapse into a cycle of unending warfare. The solution to this is twofold. First, funding must increase for our current astronautical projects to be completed, and second, incentives must be given to increase the commercialization of spaceflight and privatization of the space exploration industry. If this government does not do something soon, the world as we know it will be lost and forgotten in endless conflict.
In the centuries of recorded time human empires have always gone through a cycle. People will expand and grow throughout the world until they hit a barrier that stops them. Often this barrier is a physical obstruction. The Pindus and Rhodope Mountains as well as the Ionian, Mediterranean, and Aegean Seas stopped the expansion of early Greece, just as the Himalayas and the Atlantic Ocean stopped the Roman Empire.
Sometimes it is a cultural obstruction such as Napoleon's inability to conquer the Russian Empire and defeat Britain's naval superiority. Once a country hits that barrier, whatever it is, the civilization stops growing and eventually is either destroyed by a more powerful country, destroyed by revolts from within, or stops developing innovative technologies that allowed it to remain supreme in the known world. Such can be seen in the cases of Greece, Rome, The Holy Roman Empire, Medieval Europe, The First French Empire, The Russian Empire, and even the British Empire, though it dissolved purposely and granted independence to many of the world's new countries.
However, after the destruction of all these realms, there were always discoveries of new territory, or new enemies to confront. In our case, The United States of America is the world's dominant hegemony in everything but name. We are the only remaining superpower, the chief military authority, have the highest standard of living, and have political, economic, and cultural influence throughout the globe. However, as Frederick Jackson Turner so eloquently said in 1893, "Movement has been [the United States'] dominant fact, and...the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise," (qtd. in Zubrin 98: 27). Essentially, the basis of America's uniqueness has been founded on the frontier. The uniqueness is embodied in the inventiveness, the masterful grasp of material things, the restless energy, the dominant individualism, and the coarseness of strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness that has defined America for the last four hundred years (Zubrin 98: 27).
In fact either exploration or warfare has paved the path for all modern civilization and especially the United States. Herein lays the problem: the frontier no longer exists. Turner explained, "But never again will such gifts of free lands offer themselves...What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, The ever retreating frontier has been to the United States...and to the nations of Europe...[and now] the frontier has gone," (qtd. in Zubrin 98: 27).
All the habitable land in the world has been explored, claimed, and colonized. The only choices left are to either find a new frontier or suffer the consequences. In accordance to the Malthus theory where "the world's resources are fixed and each person is ultimately the enemy of every other person and each race or nation is the enemy of every other," a new world war will arise, but now, in the age of nuclear weapons, there might not be a world to conquer, let alone a winner to receive the spoils (Zubrin 98: 35).
So with the end of the frontier, what will happen to America and all it has stood for? "Can free, egalitarian democratic, innovating society with a can-do spirit be preserved in the absence of room to grow?" (Zubrin 98: 28). The answer is evident. Look around at society today and compare it to that of the early 1900's. In fact, look at the last 100 years and look how technology has come along. From 1890 to 1930 the world was revolutionized.
