I always enjoy Cumbrian Sky, the astro blog by Stuart Atkinson of the Eddington Astronomical Society in England.

Surprisingly, the financial Panic of 2008 supports our forecast that humanity’s future in space is just around the corner…!
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Recently Stuart hosted the Carnival of Space #165 which included my post: The Way Space Really Works. As usual, I enjoyed his intriguing introduction to my post:

Many people, myself included, fear that we really have stalled in our efforts to get people off Earth and start spreading out across the solar system, and are frustrated that there are no signs of our self-imposed exile on Earth ending. But there are optimists out there, and one of them is Bruce Cordell, who firmly believes that manned space exploration is just half a decade away from receiving a seriously hard kick up the backside. Why? You’ll have to go to his inspiring and thought-provoking 21st Century Waves blog to find out how space “really works”… or will work in 2015…

Thanks for your comments Stuart!

It always pleases me to be considered an optimist, although I’m just tracking macroeconomic and other trends over the last 200 years that make it pretty clear we’re in for excitement around 2015. And many short-term indicators also converge on this result.

For example, check Bill Halal at TechCast.org; their continuous online Delphi polling forecasts a major economic boom in 2015. In this context, it’s reasonable to expect an Apollo-size space program in response to a JFK-size boom — so we do!

But forgive me for not being as optimistic as I’d like to be. Multi-century history indicates that Maslow Windows don’t last very long. For example, Apollo was in serious political trouble by 1966 and wound up having the last 3 Apollo Moon missions canceled. Imagine what might have happened if Vietnam had heated up 2-4 years earlier than it did — we might have lost the whole program.

So this time it’s important that we — Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Americans or whomever it is –strive for self-sufficiency in space beyond Earth orbit to avoid another “Apollo pause” like we’ve had for the last 40 years…

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