I don't remember

I don't remember

On this day 35 years ago, I was nine and a half months old. I'm pretty sure I wasn't aware of much more than my mother. So, I missed seeing my fraternity brother Neil Armstrong and his partner Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon.

I don't remember much about the last Apollo missions either; I think I was four or five years old by the time they were all over.

So for me, Apollo was just history. For the people a few years older than me, say those in their 40s and early 50s today, Apollo 11 was a defining moment in their lives. Their generation was going to build cities on the moon and have flying cars and robots would do all the work. It was going to be just like the Jetsons.

The flying car dream obviously hasn't come to pass. It was based on a false premise; that Apollo was pitting capitalism against communism in the race for space.

Apollo was borne out of a race against the Soviet Union to control the high strategic ground of space: clear superiority in this race would be apparent with a landing of men on the moon. But rather than pitting the American economic strength against the USSR's military strategy of space development, the USA also chose a military route in the form of NASA.

With the military goal acheived, NASA inevitably devolved into a bureaucracy. Its very structure meant that it was finished from the moment Armstrong and Aldrin returned safely home. The death rattle has been expensive and painful to watch, more than three decades of literally going around in circles.

President Bush's new space initiative may help to change the way Americans access space. But if it is stalled now, or if NASA itself too forcefully resists the necessary changes, then the agency will continue to ossify.

The initiative is not just about NASA though, and therein lies its strength; the inclusion of the free market in space is crucial. It is only the free market that will actively seek improvements in efficiency, only the free market that will pursue the strategies necessary for long-term profit, only the free market that will ultimately drive the cost of space access down.

And the free market has a toe in the door. Private suborbital flight is a reality, for a fraction of the cost of government-funded suborbital flight. Private manned orbital missions are a few years down the road, but they are coming. Each successful flight will bring down the cost of all the rest, both due to amortization of development costs over many flights and the reduced insurance loads that come with good flight records.

Suborbital flights are the toe in the door, orbital flights are a foot in the door, regular orbital flights mean the door is torn off its hinges. And it won't take another thirty five years.