Old Glory on Mars.

Pathetic Earthlings shares his emotional response to President Bush's space initiative. I just like the fact that he illustrates his point by quoting Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road "Tunnel in the Sky." [d'oh!]

For me, when I was a kid in fifth or sixth grade - when the Earthling was gestating - I watched the Moon landing. That year I also read Red Planet and there was no doubt in my mind that someday I'd go to Mars. I remember Red Planet as a great story with intelligent Martians, a Martian environment that could be negotiated by humans with "breathers" and an exotic Martian ecology. I think it could have been the first Heinlein juvenile I ever read and it kicked off what would be a lifetime love of reading.

There is no way that Heinlein could write Red Planet today. We know too much. There is no life on Mars. Humans couldn't survive there. The idea of a teenager surviving on his own on the surface of Mars is laughable.

This is a practical age. All the more reason then to make sure that the romance of exploration stays alive.

Update: By the way, by all means check out Lileks reflections on the subject. I particularly like his essay because it too brings back memories. In 1979, I was in college and Skylab was falling. I was in the habit of carrying an engineering notebook around with that I would write down essays in at lunch - kind of a protoblog. One essay I wrote was called "Did Skylab Die for Our Sins" and had the same kind of defeatist, "we all fouled up" tone to it that Lileks describes. Really you have to be a certain age to understand the depression that event caused. Lileks and I are approximately the same age, and we had the experience of (a) seeing America concede defeat in Viet Nam; (b) watching a president driven out of office; (c) witnessing economic stagnation where everything got more expensive every year; (d) knowing that natural resources were simply going to run out by the year 2000 since that's what we were being told every day; and (e) hearing a new president repeatedly concede that America was truly fubared. Skylab falling out of the sky just seemed par for course. That's why I say "thank God for Ronald Reagan." Another four years of that mindset and we would have been living in a grimmer, uglier world.

Likewise, one of my favorite movies as a preteen/early teen was "Marooned." (Also Omega Man.) Lileks makes me want to order a copy.