CHARLIE MARTIN: In the 48th Year of Space.

Of course, Richard Nixon decided that now that we had gotten to the Moon, it wasn’t important to continue. NASA has been refocused again and again, from Earth science to low-orbit bus service to Muslim outreach, and even more destructively, has been consumed by creeping bureaucracy.

But it doesn’t matter. Now we have SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and a half-dozen other commercial space companies. We have people seriously looking at mining the asteroids and Elon Musk seriously trying to colonize Mars. And if those don’t work, the Chinese and the Japanese and the Indians will go.

I hope it’s us. Americans do best when we have a frontier.