Keeping close to home

Next week is the 50th Anniversary of Sputnik's launch. Twelve years after that, we were on the moon. Compared to those heady, rapid-fire days, the last three decades of manned spaceflight have been a cosmic let-down:

"Some space age. It has been 35 years since anybody was on the Moon, or more than 300 miles from Earth, for that matter... It is as if the response to Christopher Columbus’s voyage had been confined to mapping the reefs off Spain. It wasn’t supposed to be like this."

Columbus' trip was government sponsored, but the most significant colonies that followed--the British colonies--were largely private capital affairs with some backing from the crown. In the space age, however, we're only now reaching the stage where a Virginia Company might start moving things along. NASA pointed the way -- it's time for the entrepreneurs to pave it.

(HT: Instapundit)