Last week saw the announcement that plans for men returning to the moon were being put on hold. Money in the space program would be concentrated instead on low earth orbit, unambitious little rockets firing up a hundred miles with an eighteen wheeler’s worth of cargo for a cool billion bucks or so. Hell, airliners go up ten miles. That’s the return on our investment?

The problem with any money spent on space research is two fold. First, critics bemoan that the experiments and science done are largely worthless, overblown science fair volcanoes. It’s often a fair criticism, especially when it comes to zero-g experiments done in low earth orbit on the shuttle. Second, we are told how many problems we have here that need fixed first.

Look, Earth is at the bottom of an immense gravity well. It is expensive as hell to go up. Once up, it’s pretty damned easy and cheap to fly around. Look at the Saturn V, the giant rocket that put men on the moon. Over thirty stories tall, but by the time it got as high as the shuttle goes, most of it had dropped off. There’s a saying in space research, that once you get into low earth orbit, you’re half way to anywhere in the solar system. The key is to not come back down. Don’t send anything up that isn’t staying up there, and more to the point, isn’t useful up there in building. The complaint of expense is as if instead of Europe tossing Pilgrims to the shore of America it instead shipped them all the way across the Atlantic, went fishing for an hour and then came back. Of course that’s a waste of time and resources.

We’ve got six billion people down here and an immeasurably tiny fraction of them will ever go into space, even if we spent every ounce of our world’s resources building rockets. But therein rests the beauty of our organism. We’re walking talking seeds of civilization. Send up a couple hundred people and they’ll make another six billion up there without us building any damned space ships. Europe didn’t ship three hundred million Americans over to this hemisphere on wooden boats.

The future of space travel will not be pioneered by PhDs or space shuttle flyboys, it’s going to be the same people who always colonize, the blue collar people looking for a better life and the willingness both to take risks and get hands dirty. Think Mike Rowe, not The Right Stuff. Redesign the space program with a fifty year vision: permanent and self sufficient colonies.

Remember, the dinosaurs went extinct because they didn’t have a space program.