Why are you sitting on your butt when you could be sitting on a giant, jet propelled bomb, slamming your face into your ears, blasting your insignificant little body beyond our atmosphere?

This was originally written for the Google Lunar XPRIZE team Part Time Scientists as “Why we are a Google Lunar XPRIZE Team“.  There should be a version in German soon.

The first 50 years of human spaceflight were marked by explosive growth, culminating with 12 men exploring the surface of the moon, followed by 40 years of relative stagnation.

We need an open frontier.

Open frontier?  Like wagon trains and Star Trek?

By open frontier we’re talking about a society that participates in space exploration. Commercial, government, and private organizations all have reasonable access to explore our solar system and beyond. Ok, so it is a little like Star Trek.

Our cultures, at least in the US and most of Europe, assumed that our Governments would open the space frontier for us.

We sat back and waited.

We are nowhere near where most of us dreamed we would be. Several generations of people have had to drastically alter their dreams of a space faring culture.

We aren’t sitting on our hands any longer.

Today, we live in a remarkable world.  We have global communications (the internet), technology,  computing power, and commodity resources one could only dream of 20 years ago.  Robotics components are available at prices in the tens of US Dollars, not the millions of Dollars of the 1960’s.

“Why don’t you fellows solve your little problems and light this candle. ” – Alan Shepard

The participants in the many space related prize competitions largely popularized by the XPRIZE foundation all realize that there is something the average person can do to advance our society into space.  We don’t need to wait for a government or large company to enable space exploration.  We believe that a small group of dedicated people with diverse backgrounds and even different countries can accomplish meaningful missions that ultimately change the dreams of our generations.

We believe in action.