On Star Trek, the Starship Enterprise cruised the galaxy defending the United Federation of Planets. Is this the first step to making that future a reality?
The Personal Spaceflight Federation, whose establishment was announced Tuesday, brings together a who’s who of space entrepreneurs, including SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan, whose team won the $10 million X Prize last October, and video-game genius John Carmack, whose Armadillo Aerospace team was among the leading contenders for the prize.
The industry group plans to work with federal regulators to help draw up the “rules of the road” for suborbital space tourism, following up on last year’s landmark law on private-sector spaceflight, said Gregg Maryniak, who serves as the federation’s chief spokesman as well as executive director of the X Prize Foundation.
Actually, an association of private businesses designed to bring commerce to space seems like something one would find in a Robert Heinlein novel that anything created by Gene Roddenberry, who couldn’t even bear the though of money being used in the future.
Since our government seems more interested in subsidizing tobacco farmers and honey production than in extending humanity’s presence to the Moon, Mars and the outer planets, it’s up to private enterprise to secure humanity’s survival by placing all our eggs in more than one basket — the Earth.
0 Responses to “Birth of the Federation?”