Some of my generation had a name for ourselves: orphans of A...

Some of my generation had a name for ourselves: orphans of Apollo. We watched twelve men walk on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, certain we were reading the opening chapter of something. Settlements. Mars. The solar system as human territory. It felt inevitable, the way the next page of a book feels inevitable. And then the budget cuts came, the programme stalled, and nobody went back beyond Earth’s orbit. I remember flying to Henry Vanderbilt's Space Access Society conference in Scotsdale, Arizona in the nineties, all the way from India on very limited money, just because of my sheer enthusiasm for human space flight. And for years after, it felt like the dream had simply run out of fuel. Last year, when someone asked me, very seriously, why I am such a big fan of Elon Musk; I said: you have to understand what SpaceX means to someone like me. Just when I thought the dream had died I saw this younger entrepreneur step up and say “I will make it happen”. And he did. And for that I am willing to forgive almost any of his personal quirks. The debate was never about the man. It was about whether the thing would get built. It is getting built. That is all we ever wanted.