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Isaac Asimov, the famous science fiction author, popularizer of science, did most of his research
for his books using the library at other resources here at the American Museum of Natural History.
So when he died in the late 1990s, his widow was interested in some way to remember his
legacy as a scientist, as an educator, as a popularizer. We gather scientists on the
bleeding edge of field that is unresolved, put them on the stage, and I stand there and
get to have a fight about the subject. And it's not a debate like you typically see politicians,
"you have your three minutes", "now you"-- it's not that, it's really a conversation
we're all just having at a bar and the audience is eavesdropping on this frontier, this moving
frontier of astrophysics. This year, the subject is the where should the Space Program turn
next? Should we just keep going in orbit around the sun, boldly going where hundreds have
gone before? Or are there more interesting places to go, like the moon, Mars, or beyond?
And this is a specially hot topic right now because the White House just called to have
NASA's Moon Program removed from the portfolio of NASA and instead work on launch vehicles
that might one day, whenever, get us to Mars. But I think an interesting feature of the
new plan is the urge to privatize access to low-Earth orbit, I think that should've happened
decades ago. So that's a good sign, recognizing that if you want to turn a space program into
space industry, you have to get private enterprise to participate. When I see commercial access
to space, I don't see that as advancing our space frontier, I see that as reducing the
cost of getting to space and turning it into an entire industry that perhaps one day, anyone,
almost anyone, can participate in, even if it's simply for vacation. In the 1960s, America
was tickled, was giddy over our advances in space. If you look at what was going on, we
went from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, culminating in the landing and exploration of the lunar
surface. If you look back on that time, every single mission was a technological advance
for the previous one. We went a little higher in orbit, it was the first space walk, the
first docking, the first reconnecting, the first time to leave low-Earth orbit, the first
time to go to the moon, go down, but then you go back, first time you land on the moon,
first time you bring a rover to the moon. This sort of advance of the frontier is very
tasty to news headlines. If all you're doing is driving around the block, there's no occasion
for a journalist to extract a headline from that story.