Alas, while the technology is there, the passion seems to be gone—at least in America and Russia. While China might step up to the plate, and it claims it wishes, like President John Kennedy did, to send people to the surface of the moon and return them safely to Earth, the date for doing so seems elastic. There is none of Kennedy’s specificity in the announcements from Beijing.

Even that last extra-Terran bastion of human habitation, the ISS, is scheduled to be de-orbited in 2020. It may be that the Space Age, as we conceive it to be, is over.

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Eudaimonia