One Small Step for Man…

I’d guess that just about every American my age and many younger could finish that sentence, would know who said it and would probably know where they were when they heard it almost forty years ago. Will the next person to reach the moon be an American? It does not look that way the way things are going.

The U.S. remains #1 in military use of space, but we are being very seriously challenged in the commercial use of space. Where we were the only country that could put sophisticated satellites and spaceships into space, now this is done almost routinely by China, Russia, India, Japan and Europe. South Korea, Israel, Taiwan and Brazil are not far behind in building their space programs. The Chinese put a man in space five years ago and are working to put a man on the moon.

Where we launched satellites for other nations, most launching now is done by other countries. Countries as small as Nigeria and Singapore are paying Russia and other countries to launch satellites for them.

We’ve cut NASA’s budget by 20% in the past fifteen years. Conquering space has not been the subject of daily conversation for quite a while, although it appears that we still have the technological talent to remain an important player in the race for space. Some experts think that China may have more than the technical talent as they think of space in the same way England thought of the ocean or the U.S. of air power in the days when these countries were #1.

Our desire to protect ourselves from the enemy by barring shipments of space hardware to many countries has been a boon to other countries in the space business.