LinkedIn on Friday, April 17, 2026

Enough of writing about Donald J. Trump and his Looney Tunes cabinet.  After hearing Secretary Hegseth quoting fictional scripture according to Samuel L. Jackson’s character in “Pulp Fiction,” I’ve had it for at least the next few days.

Instead, let’s talk about something that really is awe inspiring for the right reasons, the voyage of our four astronauts around the moon and back.  It was a daring and exciting venture, the courage and technology for which deserve our respect and admiration.

Growing up, I was a huge fan of Star Trek and still love the idea of our species going into space, unfortunately that’s not what we’re doing.  What we’re doing is spending a fortune, wasting scientific expertise and risking the lives of our most adventurous explorers for what amounts to no good reason.

The problem with the exploration of space is that, well, it’s so spacious.  Everything’s so far away.  The moon is relatively close.  Then Mars, someday relatively soon.  But the stars?  Other planets and the other countless intelligent species that are certainly somewhere out there?  They’re so far away, we’ll never get there, not with the means of space travel we’ve been using for the past 80 year history of our efforts to go beyond the earth’s atmosphere.

All this time and we’re still putting people in tiny capsules on top of giant sticks of dynamite, figuratively speaking of course.  “BOOM!” and good luck.

Our problem is that we’ve been going about it “bassackwards.”  From the very beginning, we’ve always known that blasting off on rockets – while an acceptable technology for launching satellites, space telescopes and solar system probes – will never ever get us into deep space, to the stars and planets where other people live.  When you think about it, making contact is, after all, the only really good reason to explore space.

Instead of spending any more time and money developing rocket-based space travel which we will sooner or later abandon – and which is teaching us little or nothing about the alternatives, so what’s the point? – we need to stop it.  Instead, put everything we can, financially and intellectually, into to figuring out another means of space travel.

Can we travel at the speed of light?  Even so, it would take our astronauts more than four years to get to the nearest star with planets our own species could inhabit.  Could we go faster than the speed of light?  Einstein said “No,” but then he may be no more than a modern day Isaac Newton and the first to admit he’d been wrong if science figures out a way to do it.

FYI, round numbers, the fastest humans have ever traveled into space or back, propelled by rocket engines and/or gravity, has been 25,000 miles/hour.  Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.  There are 3,600 seconds in an hour, so light speed is 186,000 miles/second x 3,600 seconds/hour or roughly 670 million miles/hour – which, needless to say, is way faster than our record to date.  By what means would we be able to travel that fast?  And that would enable our astronauts to “fly” around some distant solar system and eventually come home?  And how would we communicate with them over distances that great?

These are the problems on which our space scientists and engineers should be working.  Until they’re solved, everything else is waste of time.  …That said, to the crew of the Orion, “Welcome home.” and to all who made NASA’s Artemis II mission possible, “Well done.”