Into the Great Expanse

I can clearly remember the day my ten-year-old self imagined that by the early twenty-first century space travel would be as common as commercial flying. I sat in the school library and did the maths as to how old I would be decade by decade. My little moment of contemplation came after wasting my lunchtime hiding in the school library, poring over a Ladybird book on space. I was obsessed with space. Aside from holidays on Mars, I also imagined that we would have gravity-defying cars and android playmates. Though the recent launch of Artemis II to the Moon has reawakened that boy within me, I do feel we are lagging technologically. Something went wrong in the 1970s that stalled progress, not only in space flight but more widely in our global manufacturing base.