My wife and in-laws go to a monthly “pooja”. It is a Hindu prayer meeting and a great time to reconnect with friends. It is held at a different person’s house each month. Last year, I had gone. It was a great opportunity to meet people and maybe get on of them to participate in my project.

Nataraja and I used to work together at HP. I was happy that he was willing to sit down and talk about it.

He is one of the few people that had heard about us returning to the moon. He is interested in space exploration and says that one of the ways he stays informed is through the information I have been posting on Facebook.

His two children were interested in space exploration in elementary school. But like most children those interests fade to be replaced by other interests.

My younger son, Christopher, had been going to Coach David’s tennis classes for over a decade. Sonia and I both went to pick him up this time. I see our friend Meenakshi in the background talking to Sonia in the interview.

Kennedy was there and I struck up a conversation with him. He had been in the military. He takes yearly vacations to Thailand. And I remember it being a good conversation.

Kennedy in our conversation brings up two issues that will need to be addressed if we are going to become a space faring civilization with wide support.

First, “What new thing do we hope to discover on the moon that we did not discover in 1969.” This idea of space been about “firsts” and “achievement” needs to be shifted to “development” and “exploration” and “discovery”. But I think we need to put more of the emphasis on the “development of space infrastructure”. We need to create this compelling vision of humanity moving out into the solar system.

And perhaps it is not something that is possible to do with words. I think the idea of the space economy that some people envision will not be understood until after it happens. “Work with the willing” is a phrase we need to keep in mind. We should try to make the vision compelling and accessible. But at the same time, we need to be careful not to get in a situation where we feel we need everyone to buy into. What we need is to get enough to buy into it that it actually happens. Once it happens than the masses will be better able to understand it and support it. Until then it just feels like science fiction.

But one thing we must not do is undermine that future by emphasizing “one time goals”. Tell people it is about development and discovery. Tell them it is about exploration and about training to go further. But don’t tell them it is about simply “getting the first woman on the moon”. We will do that, and do it quickly. It is something that should have been done. But let us not use that to rally support. Because that support will turn into an obstacle, just as soon as that goal is met. “We got the first woman on the moon. Now let’s shut down the program.” We do not want to set ourselves up for this.

We are going to the moon as a “step into the future” … a future were humans travel the solar system like they voyage the globe. A future where humans can choose to live where ever they want. A future were the earth is protected from industrialization, but where humanity is unrestrained and can move forth.

The second issue that I noticed in Kennedy’s responses was the idea “We messed up the earth and we will just mess up the moon too.”. I will hear this idea many times over the coming year. I do not remember it as early as Kennedy’s interview. I thought it was an interview later in January. But it is something that comes up.

We humans are ashamed of ourselves. But we feel powerless to change it. And we do not want it to inconvenience ourselves. We want to become better for free. We think the problem with humanity is the other guy. We think “if only they would…” But humanity is all of us. Every injustice that any human does is the responsibility of all humans to some extent. And we need to continuously work to improve ourselves and to create the conditions that cause those around us to grow and to improve themselves. We need to sit down and learn to have dialog. We need to focus our energies on actually addressing and solving problems rather than our pastime of politics and economics. Betting on companies is less useful than creating them. Politics is less important than working with our neighbors to make our streets and neighborhoods better places.

I started taking flying lessons at United Flight Systems at the David Wayne Hooks Memorial Airport in the fall of 2019. I had taken flying lessons in college, earning around 6 hours of flying time. But I did not have that much money then. And now I was working on getting my pilots license. I would have expected to have my license by now, but when the lockdown happened in March, I decided to put it on hold. Now that vaccines are being given out, I think I am close to being able to return.

In order to make the Countdown to the Moon project easier, I started interviewing people at the places that I would go. I interviewed several people from United Flight Systems. Marie was the first one.

She found the idea of us going to the moon in 2024 of slight interest. It would make a good headline but was not the beginning of a new era. It was not opening up the solar system to humanity. It would not be something to celebrate.

My mom was alive during the time that the Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik. In fact, kids at the time would play a game throwing a ball of the house and yelling “SPUTNIK”.

My mom says that at the time the Americans felt like they were behind and we needed to go to the moon to catch up.

Everyone shut down to watch the moon landing. But it may not be watched by many if it does not get much press coverage. And we have more than 3 stations so harder to have it covered by all.

Back then there were limited TV stations: ABC, NBC, and “I don’t know what to see”, and limited newspapers: Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle

But now we are all living in our own information bubble.