I hate to fly, but long for the stars.

When I was a lad, a thing called SKYLAB fell from the sky.

They knew it was going to fall, of course; a lot of laws have been bent and twisted and broken over the years, but the simplicity of Newton's first law, "What goes UP, must come DOWN" has never been defeated.

The thing of it was, they weren't certain WHERE it was going to come down.

That's the problem with putting things up there....you're never sure where they're going to land.

So.....all that day, I wore a white hard hat with a target drawn on its top. I didn't get hit by falling debris, but I did get my laughs, which is what I was going for in the first place. I was going for laughs; not for space debris.

I saw DEAD LIKE ME. I know what happens when you get hit by the space toilet seat.

It was July of 1979. Ten days later, I stopped laughing for what seemed like forever. But I've told that story, so I'm moving on.....

If we attribute the first actual flight of Heavier Than Air Craft to the Wright Brothers in 1903, and the first successful landing upon a foreign celestial body at 1969, then we managed to go from Zero to The Moon in 66 years, give or take a few months.

And in the ensuing 42 years, we have done nothing more than build an airplane that can get to a Space Station that will evenutally fall to Earth.

And even that is pretty much done, or will be soon. And even though there is talk of a 'Next Generation' of space exploration.....there is a general belief that the people of the USA don't think there's any practical reason to journey out there, anymore.

There's enough to do here, I guess. We have projects here on Earth we can better use that money for. Perhaps a Corn Museum in Nebraska. Or a Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska.

It's amazing how far we haven't come.

The Spirits of Lewis and Clark, Robert Peary, Edmund Hillary, Richard Francis Burton, the Wright Brothers, the Montgolfier Brothers, and the spirits of those men and women who gave all so that we could explore that 'Final Frontier' are weeping.