Editorial: The challenge of space exploration to the Moon, Mars, and the planets beyond should be one of the human race, not just of individual nations, in the 21st Century. The peoples of the United States, Russia, China, India, Japan, and, the European Union should join in a multilateral effort to take humans to Mars and enable all mankind to benefit from the knowledge and benefits to be gained.
Just as President John F. Kennedy envisioned in his speech to the United Nations United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 20, 1963, in a speech largely directed to the Soviet leadership, we today, as Americans, Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Japanese, Indians, and other nationalities, have again the opportunity to achieve together humankind's greatest single accomplishment of the first half of the 21st Century.
President Barack Obama has before him a very unique opportunity to engage mankind in a global dialectic to push technology, knowledge, and human civilization to a new height never before achieved in human history: a true multinational treaty effort to lead humanity to explore the cosmos hand-in-hand.
The costs are simply too great and the technological investment challenges too much of a burden on any one single national economy to mount human space expeditions to the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids. But together, Earth's space-capable nations can become a spacefaring humanity. Such a goal, backed by international law and dedicated mulit-state cooperation, could change the course of human history.
At first blush, the thought of such a significant goal of human deep space exploration among nations that have, at points in the past, fought wars with one another may sound utopian or even a scene of science fiction, but it has the rational of a well-crafted dialectic.
In 1963, John F. Kennedy faced the concerns of Cold War fear, technology transfer, and cultural differences. Nonetheless, a young president of the New Frontier made the offer in a statement to the world and stated his thesis to which the Soviets, in error, rejected. The anti-thesis to the idea of interplanetary exploration has been one based upon national security. The period of the post-Cold War has resulted in American nation as a space leader but one now retrenched in costly regulatory regimes in a false-witted attempt to bottle space technology to American shores.
The finite resources of individual nations, the contradictions in geopolitics, and the globalization of economics are bringing space-capable nations to the turning point of significant qualitative change. The spiral of change is challenging space-capable humanity to forge the technology and knowledge to explore beyond our planet, together and as a human species - not solely as Americans, Russians, Chinese, or Indians.
If nothing more, on this the 46th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination, perhaps it is worthy to again think about the once president's remarks to the United Nations just a month prior to his death. Then renew hope for humankind on the New-New Frontier. There may even be the chance to gain understanding on the question: 'are we alone in the Universe?"
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