Despite dreams of colonizing Mars and zipping off to the neatest stars, it seems that the fate of the US Space Program is often in retreat, especially with regards to Human Spaceflight. The Artemis 2 mission to send three astronauts around the Moon has been delayed again (in February 2026) for reasons similar to the delays experienced by the Artemis 1 mission several years ago. Furthermore, NASA has restructured the Artemis missions to start landing on the moon with Artemis 4 and not Artemis 3. Instead, Artemis 3 will concentrate on testing docking and refueling maneuvers. So, more retreat. No human is likely to go beyond the Moon until, realistically, after 2040. Perhaps we shouldn’t. That is, maybe we can get more out of space travel with purely robotic probes. This avenue has taken us a bit farther. For instance, we’ve sent many landers and orbiters to Mars and have studied its surface in detail. The most distant problems have gone beyond 10 billion miles from Earth, though it has taken them years, and in some cased, multiple decades, to get there. There has been some investment investigating Saturn and Jupiter, though with no surfaces to land on (save for, so far, Titan), there has been much less interest than in Mars. There has been very little invested in new technologies that could aid in getting us to the distant solar system or even potentially, nearby stars.

All of this is reminiscent of the science fiction productions of Gerry Anderson, in particular, Journey to the Farside of the Sun and Space: 1999. In this Universe, disaster upon disaster have led to a space program that is somehow still convinced to fund bare bones missions, but only gets beyond the solar system through near apocalyptic accidents that catapult unexpecting astronauts to the rest of the Galaxy. The only time when there is no further worry that politics will interfere with missions no more (other than alien politics) is the instant in which the last of the Earth politicians remaining on the Moon is cast off into space. Maybe Star Trek was smarter in avoiding any kind of direct throughline from the then current space program to future space development by setting the show in the distant future (at least hundreds of years off). The old-joke is that interstellar travel is a technology of the future and always will be.

If you are liking what you read here, you might be interested in my(Steve Bloom) 2016 book, The Physics and Astronomy of Science Fiction, published by McFarland, and available from your favorite online sellers as well as direct from McFarland (paperback or e-book)..