PERSPECTIVE ON THE APOLLO ANNIVERSARY : Wagons Ho! The People’s Space Frontier Beckons : Give the private sector a shot at cost-effective, environmentally sound off-planet travel and exploration.

Twenty-five years after Lewis and Clark returned from exploring western America, the Conestoga wagons were rolling.

Twenty-five years after the Wright brothers flew their tiny flying machine, Americans were buying airline tickets.

Twenty-five years after Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, we sit at home watching old astronauts reminisce on talk shows.

To a 25-year-old American, the “greatest moment in human history” is ancient history. So is it any wonder polls find pessimism about the future among the younger generation? Listening to Neil Armstrong as he put his foot upon the lunar surface, that 25-year-old American, having been told to expect a future less prosperous than his parents’, has the right to ask a few tough questions: A giant leap to where? For what?

What happened to the grand frontier of NASA rhetoric? If NASA is our Lewis and Clark, when do the wagons roll? If space is supposed to be a frontier, when do the people get to go?

Twenty-five years after Apollo (and more than 35 years after the space program started), it costs more, not less, to put a human in space. Meanwhile, we are fed lie after lie about a fantastic space station that has nothing at all to do with you and me, and the participation of the taxpayers who fund it all is reduced to listening to the astronauts’ wake-up music on CNN.

To top it all off, the head of NASA then dares to decry the lack of vision among the American people when they hesitate to pay for this mediocrity. What nerve. We have vision, lots of vision; NASA has simply failed to deliver a product that Americans want.

In polls, when Americans are asked if they’d like to go into space themselves, almost 50% say yes, if only for a brief visit. Unfortunately, at several million dollars a ticket, they can’t.

Conventional wisdom is that space is so expensive, only governments can afford it. Wrong! Space is expensive precisely because it has been almost totally government domain. (Remember who bought us the million-dollar toilet?) If the current space agency had been in charge of the American frontier, all that would lie west of the Mississippi today would be a luxury condo for four government employees somewhere in Kansas.

If space is a real frontier, we must treat it as such. We must decide that opening the frontier is the goal by which we measure all of our human space activities, not just science-settlement. This is a major distinction demanding a whole different national discussion. The debate is no longer humans versus robots. Human activities are the goal. Thus the new debate must be over the best and lowest-cost way to open space to permanent human habitation. (This will often mean we send robots first because they’re cheaper.) We need our government to enable us to get to space and start the work of pioneering, not to do space for us while we watch on TV.

Our first frontier priority must be to develop cheap, reliable and clean transportation to space. We must begin to phase out the old space shuttle, with its $1-billion-a-flight cost and its ozone-layer-destroying motors. Instead, the single-stage-to-orbit rocket project, with its rapid turnaround, clean motors and low cost should be made a national priority before the bureaucrats kill it.

We must cancel the ridiculously overpriced space station and let credible private firms bid for the job. This includes Russian firms and U.S. companies that want to recycle the space shuttle’s external tanks, turning these $500-million structures into useful facilities, instead of having them dumped over the Pacific.

And we must return to the moon, this time to stay. This doesn’t mean an Antarctica-style camp but new enterprises in joint government and private ventures. For example, the Japanese are already developing systems to build solar power plants in space from lunar soil, using American designs. Lunar habitats have been designed and redesigned. We can do this. Why aren’t we?

To survive as a nation, we need the space frontier, a new national challenge that is exciting and involves the maximum number of us possible. It is not America’s destiny to survive as the bureaucratic overlord of a gradually dying planet, crammed full with a divided humanity fighting over scraps and choking on its own wastes. Let us turn outward before we turn on ourselves. The frontier is calling, and this time we need not take it from anyone else.

Imagine a kid desperate for a dream 25 years from now, sitting in a home powered by sunlight captured in space, who can look to the moon or planets and know that there are people just like her out there. Imagine the power to motivate our children to succeed on this limitless frontier as humanity climbs out of its Earth-bound cradle.

On this Apollo anniversary, it’s right to honor the real heroes who took the first “small steps,” but we must keep our eyes on the future and what we--you and me and that person over there--can achieve. We all have the right stuff. We are Americans. We are a frontier people. Give us our frontier and let us prove it.