"We choose to go to the moon...not because (it) is easy but because (it) is hard."

I'm jealous of my parent's generation. They were fortunate to experience something that we can only dream about. Forty years ago, they were able to sit in their living rooms with the television on and watch Walter Cronkite comment while the world watched and listened to the first men touch the surface of the moon. They witnessed history that cannot be described. And 30 years after the last Apollo mission, we haven't returned.

This may go against any political philosophy I supposedly subscribe to, but there is something devastating about humanity's failure to continue our curiosity of the universe. We haven't left orbit since the Apollo missions and have only now discussed the possibility of moving beyond the International Space Station. Where is the passion? Where is the dream? We've been waiting for it to come, only to be placated by Hollywood special effects and the literary imagination from the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and others.

When President John F. Kennedy declared that we would reach the moon by the end of the 1960's, he gave NASA, and America, a mission; reach the celestial body and prove to ourselves that we are still the explorers that define our heritage. It seems to have been the last time anyone pursued the unknown in this country. After we landed on the moon NASA lost a purpose and, consequentially, public funding. No longer did we have a dream to explore a new world. Now we had a dream to do something else. But that something else was never defined. And with Congress balking at space exploration in the name of bailouts for banks who took too much of a risk and buying companies that didn't know how to run a business there is little hope that the something else will ever be realized.

It's sad to think that Kennedy's speech at Rice University could be the last time anyone laid out an exploratory goal so moving that it captured all humanity. That moment, those words saying we will go to the moon, could not only be the birth of the mission to accomplish the impossible but also be the death of human's greatest distinction from animal life: the desire to explore.

Every place on this planets was discovered by someone who wanted to see what was out there first hand. Early history has people moving from Africa to Europe and Asia to find out if there was a better place. The Americas were inhabited by people for the same reason and then discovered by those who wanted to see if there was another route, another way. Lewis and Clark gave us a glimpse of what was beyond the Mississippi while Magellan made the world smaller in his circumnavigation nearly 300 years earlier. But each exploration, each discovery, was continued by someone else. Columbus' incidental landing in the Carribean gave new impetus to find out more about the New World. Lewis and Clark gave way for Zebulon Pike to find out what was in the southern part of the Louisiana Territory. Men and women continued to push the limits and discover new realities. But not any longer.

When the frontier was declared vanished by the U.S. Census bureau for the 1890 census, the idea of exploration seemed to start its death. There were advances in flight in the first half of the 20th Century, with Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindbergh, but even these explorers couldn't carry the excitement long after the fatal crashes of both Post in 1935 and Earhart in 1937.

But one thing held true out of all these explorers; their achievements led to future adventures for many people across the world. People now live virtually anywhere on Earth and flying is now a common occurance for millions daily. Our world changed dramatically because of the actions of these heroes. So why has space exploration died?

When men landed on the moon, it seemed only natural that we would soon expand our world to encompass our natural sattelite. But nothing came of it. Government deemed it too expensive and no private venture has taken its place. We are left without the imagination and are stuck grounded on Earth, doomed to stare at the brightest object of the night sky and wonder what could've been. If only we would make it back to the moon, travel to Mars, or try to see what else we can do in this great big universe.