See you on the moon

I finally figured out how much money it will take to get people to pay attention to me: $10 million, evidently. For those who still don't know, that was the tidy sum handed over to the SpaceShipOne team Monday in reward for its monumental achievement of getting to space without any government funding. The Ansari X Prize, founded 8 years ago, was given to the team when that met the requirements of two flights on the same vehicle within two weeks of each other. So, we now have private citizens with the capacity to reach space. This is a good thing. The catch: Nobody cares. \nThe one-year anniversary of China's first man in space, Yang Liwei, is a week away, and nobody knows this. This is a bad thing. Everyone I talk to knows "X Prize! $10 million!" but not one remembers the pilot's name, Brian Binnie. Personally, I think this superhero-esque name would be easy to remember, but evidently the only things we can keep in our heads for more than one afternoon is the all-too-sexy letter X and wads of cash. \nDon't get me wrong, I saw the Web sites, the newscasts; there was a lot of coverage Monday. Some realized that the event was innately cool. Others, "interesting." One girl: "So what? That's a lot of money, but other than that, who cares?" I don't think she gets it.\nWhat happened to the space race, when a base on the moon seemed worth the money getting it there? When governments and their citizens actually cared to see a fully-functional space station instead of a glorified tin can? The largest communist country in the world, responsible for billions of dollars of trade, violator of more human rights than satellites in the sky, gets a foothold in space and the Western world yawns? I don't know quite when or why we lost our love of space, but I know it's gone, and that's sad. \nThings are getting a little packed down here with over 6 billion people. We're running out of nonrenewable resources, and we're destroying what we do have in beauty to get at what's left. Resources and room are the two main arguments for space: Face it, we're either going to prevent people from having sex (not happening) or take to the stars.\nWe're running this planet's ecosystem into the ground, and that hole in the ozone layer isn't going to patch up anytime soon. Mars and Venus, however, are just sitting there with that "Come over here and colonize me!" look on their faces. Terraforming, the process of creating an atmosphere and ecosystem, would be a pretty solid investment on Mars, Venus, their moons and the moons of the outer planets. \nThere are other arguments: Having all our eggs in one asteroid-target-shaped basket probably isn't a good idea. A lot of technologies have developed thanks to the zero-gravity environment and more are waiting. Space is a nice, open vacuum to set up enough solar panels to power the world while leaving plenty of real estate space back on the dirtball. How about mining the asteroid belt? And no matter what your political affiliations, a Star Wars program really would be pretty effective for diplomatic leverage. Control of space (and by control of space, I mean significantly more than a couple of footprints, broken down rovers and poorly designed space stations) will lead to control of the world -- it's that simple. \nThe fact is that outer space is not getting the attention it deserves for the many things it can give us. Maybe SpaceShipOne and I will make a start -- maybe people will want to be astronauts again. See you on the moon.