Have Moon, Will Travel

Over at The Book View Cafe, Steven Popkes has written an interesting and inspiring piece about private enterprise and space travel, using Heinlein's book The Man Who Sold The Moon as his launching pad.

On getting to the Moon, he writes:

I'm tired of one shots to places. Exploration is fine and I love it. Science is fine and I love it. But we need a space traveling culture. A space based industry. And we're not going to get that as long as long as we have to crawl out of the earth gravity well every time we turn around. Until that happy day we carve a hole in Vesta and use it to move around, the next best place to work is the Moon.

As per usual when I read such stuff, I wonder if I'll get to see us as a species heading in the right direction (upwards) before I shuffle off this very earthly plane.