During the December 1999 servicing mission of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery recorded a magnificent image of the full Moon partially obscured by the atmosphere of Earth. It’s rare to see the Moon this way, even from space (so they tell me), so when I ran across this during a recent archive search, I downloaded the image immediately for my collection. I love going through the image archives because they are such a valuable record of the achievements people have made in space. I fear that the way things are going, what with the cancellation of the next servicing mission to HST, plus the emphasis on Moon and Mars missions that seem to be driven more by political ambition than good science returns, the scenes recorded in NASA’s vast image collections may not be repeated for a long time.

Mind you, I have no problems with missions to the Moon and Mars, or even to the stars. We should have been doing them all along and by now we should have places to visit and study on the Moon. But, history and politics and Earth-based problems have taken their toll on the space program in many ways. That’s the reality of big “public works” projects, no matter what they are and which country is funding them. They are a mix of hopes and dreams and scientific goals and political realities and cultural mindsets and human fears and emotions. Sometimes I think it’s a wonder huge projects get done at all, except that I know how teamwork can advance even the most difficult objectives.

And so it is with space exploration. We will get out there. The big questions remain to be answered. When? How? Who will go? Who will pay? Who will benefit? How can humans team up to make the scientific, cultural, political, and financial advancements necessary to accomplish the goals? Big questions, all of them. They loom over our future in space like a huge nearly full Moon, bright and shiny and beckoning. It’s a challenge in a way, and it’s one from which I hope we do not back down.