This last October 5 was the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. Between, 1957 and 1969, only twelve years past, yet we went from orbiting the Earth to landing a man on the moon. In the face of such a burst of pyrotechnics, we might ask what’s happened lately? Why has it taken so long to get back to plans for a simple orbiting space station, or for a return to the moon and a manned visit to Mars? Has the space age fizzled?

The late Sixties, the early space age, still bubbled with the pioneering spirit that had been an American legacy for two hundred years. Once the United States burst into space, it seemed perfectly reasonable that our expansion would continue to the moon, Mars, and even the stars. Remember the movie 2001: a space Odyssey? When Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke peered through this brew of space age optimism, they saw human space travel to Jupiter. That should have been 6 years ago. We should have made contact with aliens by now and sent Dave Bowman off to transcendence beyond humanity.

But that huge quantum leap has not happened. In fact, human space travel seems to have made one leap out to the moon, then settled back into a comfortable steady state, reaching no farther than low Earth orbit. After the initial excitation, the cold realities of true space travel have knocked us back.

We’ve learned a lot about human travel in space. Beyond the cradle of Earth, we leave behind abundant mother Earth, who provides us with food, water, and even air. Worse still, we leave the shielding electromagnetic shroud that protects us from random hurtling particles, radiation that erode the DNA and may even damage brain cells. How do we face up to such obstacles?

Should we try?

Will we learn something new and worthwhile? Will we make life better for ourselves? The Jamestown colonists may have asked themselves these questions before they traveled to the New World. Just as the Vikings five hundred years before them, and the Polynesians a thousand years before them, all the way back to the unknown travelers who left Africa a hundred thousand years ago.

In each case, men, women, and children faced frightening barriers—deserts, mountains, seas, and vast oceans. But in the end they went, they established distant outposts that could look back at their home, glowing on the horizon of the desolation and see it in a new way. Eventually, they learned to cross the barriers and establish new homes—but they also learned to communicate back to the distant place that had once been home. Travel, pushing boundaries, gained new perspectives on their worlds, their tools, and themselves.

Should we try?

Yes. I think we should. I think we have reached a building point, a place where technology and dreams must be rallied before another jump can be made. For those of us who grew up in the space age, this hesitation time may seem dull, but I believe, that at some point, humanity will again jump outward, and one day a child living in a place we thought unlivable will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.