Apparently the White House wants to hear from me. So, I thought I would give my personal opinion on the state of things.

We’re in a recession. We have a huge amount of debt. There really no end in sight, at least not one that I can see. America has gone from innovating and creating industry to consuming and, well, just consuming. It is time for us to stand up and lead the world once again. Lets create a new economy, a new industry and a new beginning for ourselves.

It is time for a grand vision that will spur the workforce, invigorate the economy and build a new industry that we will lead. We’ve done this before with the computer revolution and again with the Internet revolution. We can do it once more, but this time it should be a revolution of galactic proportions.

Let us once again explore the galaxy. Not just robots, but lets put humans on Mars. Lets put humans on Near Earth Objects. Heck lets go to Enceladas and other interesting moons too! We can develop the new infrastructure, the new propulsion and the new way of thinking that goes along with it.

The Earth only has so many resources. Eventually, maybe not today, but eventually we will run out. Water, precious metals and the building blocks of just about everything are all resources that will eventually expire. Today the resource we need the most is energy. We need good, clean and affordable energy. By using Space Based Solar Power, or even technology simply developed for long-duration space flight we can become a producer of energy that the world would buy from. We would switch from a consumer of foreign oil to a producer of clean, affordable energy. When fresh drinking water becomes more scarce, we would be ready with our space inspired water refinement. Not only would we convert back to a production society, but we could also mine near Earth objects to help greatly reduce the national debt.

Some of the near Earth objects we have floating nearby (relatively speaking of course) are worth an estimated $20,000,000,000,000.00 dollars. That’s $20 trillion if you lost track of the 0′s there. The current estimated US debt is around $12 trillion dollars or just over 1/2 of the value of just one near Earth object. Lets assume that it takes $10 trillion to develop all of the technology and infrastructure required to mine one of these asteroids. That reduces our national debt to around $2 trillion which means that by mining two asteroids we would have a national credit of $8 trillion. I think National Credit sounds a lot nicer than National Debt, don’t you?  That healthcare no one is sure how to pay for? Paid in full. Social Security? Secure.

Flexible path is not the path. I know we have a lot of people that support it, but we should go all out when it comes to space. We should be setting aggressive timelines. We should be producing new vehicles and trying out cutting edge ideas. We should be laying the groundwork for private industry to bring mere mortals to Mars, the Moon, and other places across our solar system where we can find new jobs, new resources and a new way of living. We should be leading the planet on the greatest journey humans have ever undertaken.

It will take a charismatic leader, a lot of optimism, patience, money and vision to make a plan like this come together. We had this in the 60′s for a brief moment and have yet to see it again. Do we have what it takes 50 years later to pick up the dropped baton and unite the planet in our greatest adventure ever? Make no mistake, this is a very difficult series of events to line up perfectly. It is completely possible that the 60′s were our one shot, and it is now gone, forever. I certainly hope that is not the case.

I’m clearly bias towards space. Heck, I host a space web site! But I do so out of my own pocket because it truly is something I believe in. I don’t make a living working in the space industry. I’m not employed on the space coast. Heck, I work in IT for a real estate company in the middle of Minnesota, nowhere near any cool space companies like Boeing of Lockheed.  I believe in this because I believe space is our way out. It can solve our recession, our economic problems, our environment problems, our energy problems and any resource problems that may crop up along the way. We just need to look at space in new and innovative ways to see that while it may look empty, in all actuality space is full of everything required to solve almost all of the problems we have today.

I would like to see us extend our reach to the stars in a big, bold move. The White House asked me to be succinct, include metrics of progression, suggest who could lead the project and techniques used to accomplish the goals stated. I really did none of those things. Fortunately I do not believe I am the only one who believes in this vision. I invite all those who believe that our destiny is among the stars to chime in here. What metrics of progression would we have? Who would lead it? NASA? How would we accomplish these goals in a timeline that wouldn’t bore the American people (which generally means under a decade)? Make your voice heard along with mine. It’s time to leave this planet and build a whole new beginning for the human race. If the President wants to know what we think, lets make sure we have a very loud and unified voice: the future of America is in space!