Obviously, it was international politics and Cold War thinking that woke a fire under the Americans in the late 1950s. But that has little to do with what I'm

Obviously, it was international politics and Cold War thinking that woke a fire under the Americans in the late 1950s. But that has little to do with what I'm talking about. The Boomers, who are the predominant generation today, grew up on Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, Star Trek and 2001 and model rocketry. We lived and breathed space exploration. There is a huge ready-made audience for more great achievements in space. We need national leaders who can inspire the voters to allocate the funding. The last few presidents haven't been very enthusiastic. G.W.Bush actually did have a vision of replacing the Shuttle, but unfortunately he didn't lock in the funding for the replacement Orion/Constellation systems before his term ended, so the U.S. ended up with no means to get humans into orbit, a rather embarrassing predicament for the world's erstwhile leader in space travel.