This week marks the 40^th anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the moon. It is a journey that began long ago when mankind first set out to explore the nearby hills and trees and then stretched across the millennia. In the course of so many lifetimes, we began our first voyages across the ocean by boat and later by plane, followed by that giant leap on 16 July 1969, though it was also but another small step in many.

Progress has been the primary element to our survival since the beginning; it has been greatly valued by those societies which have managed to thrive even when great sacrifice was involved. Unfortunately, the tale of progress does not have a happy ending as yet. For, in the mid-1970s the U.S. Congress astonishingly voted to cut funding to NASA’s lunar program, which by now would likely have spawned a host of great discoveries and possibly even a few manned missions to Mars and perhaps beyond. We will never know what could have come of that lost half century, but it is safe to assume much would have been the reward, because that has been the eternal nature of mankind’s pattern of exploration and discovery.

Ironically, members of Congress who voted to kill the Apollo moon program in favor of expanding social welfare programs that many predicted would be a disaster and now we see were complete and total failures like for others to think of them as “progressives”. During the same period such self-appointed “progressives” allocated funds like drunken sailors to a plethora of counter-productive social programs, they embarked on starving the two areas most necessary for survival: defense and space; the former allowing Soviet expansion to regress human rights around the world and the latter even endangered what was in the early 1970s a nascent space shuttle program. (1) (2) (3) (4)

There has been nothing progressive about enduring the backward thinking with regard to any of these things. And there is nothing progressive about essentially continuing for another half century in the same direction. Instead of being “progressive”, such in Congress instead became “regressive”, obsessed only with looking back to outmoded ways of running government, to organizing mankind based on race rather than character, and of course by halting mankind’s journey to new frontiers.

While limited-thinkers continue to live in yesteryear and remain determined to keep the rest of us there also, the frontier calls. If the frontier of space is anything like all the other frontiers before it which we have faced, it will ultimately prove invaluable to our survival. Those hopelessly sentimental who do not understand this continue to lie down in the roadway, accusing us of being heartless for having the need to move forward. This farce serves no purpose and is the reason why today we have moved backward in our space program instead of being much farther along than we were half a century ago. Fans of the television series Star Trek might be dismayed to discover there would be no “Enterprise” in the 23^rd Century had such regressives run things in the fictional space of that story’s narrative. Indeed, the future history of the real world in which we live would be equally as bleak.

Today, astronomers and other scientists, small children, and the entire world wistfully gaze up into the stars and wonder if in our lifetimes a human being will ever set foot on Mars, return to the moon or even if we will be able to put another space station up, so far backward have we moved. Mankind, once the heirs to a bright future measured by great leaps now must sit content to watch re-runs of Star Trek or live in a make-believe galaxy far, far away. Meanwhile our own saga of space flight becomes one of long ago and the tools and resources we will need to thrive in our future as a species remain untapped by a disastrously retrograde mindset.