On July 20, 1969 human beings first stepped onto the surface of the moon. First was Neil Armstrong, second was Buzz Aldrin. By 1972, when the Apollo program ended, a total of 12 men had walked on the moon. No human beings have been there since. Today, some people look back at that remarkable event and feel pessimistic about the future.

The year before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, showed us an exciting future. In the movie, Pan American owned and operated commercial spaceships that flew people up to an enormous space station, where ordinary people could check a Hilton hotel. Meanwhile, there was a base on the moon serviced with regular flights between the Earth and the Moon. With a discovery of an alien artifact, a manned space ship was soon on its way to Jupiter. Computer technology had gotten so good that the HAL9000 was sentient and self aware.

But when we look at the real 2001, let alone our current 2012, we don’t find people living on the moon. There’s no Hilton on the International Space Station, since it has the interior volume of only a five bedroom house. The few tourists who have visited it had to pay twenty million dollars or more for the privilege. They did not ride up in a nice Pan American owned shuttle. Pan American went bankrupt years ago. It didn’t even exist as an airline in 2001.

The future is not what the movies made it out to be.

So where did our future go? Do we have reason to feel disappointed?

Had we had the will, we could easily enough have created much of what was envisioned in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. But on the other hand, the future we did create, in many ways outstrips the imagination of those who created that particular film.

Consider. In 1969, the year that Apollo 11 reached the lunar surface, only large corporations and governments used computers. They were expensive, noisy, and room-sized. There was no internet and no cell phones. Our current connected society dependent upon ubiquitous computers was never imagined in that movie nor in any of the other science fiction stories of the time.

The International Space Station is not as large as the one in the movie, but it does exist and it has been continuously inhabited by an international crew for more than ten years now. Six people call it home for six months at a time.

A more significant reality not envisioned in the movie, or even imaginable at the time, was that the Soviet Union wouldn’t even exist when the year 2001 dawned. In fact, the Soviet Union had come to an end ten years earlier. No more cold war. Instead, Russia is now a capitalist country. Our relations with them are not perfect, but we do work together in space. The current Atlas rocket, the Atlas V, is the descendent of a missile originally designed as an ICBM to obliterate Russian targets. But the engines used by today’s Atlas V are built in Russia. They are engines that were originally used in Russian ICBMs designed to obliterate American targets. Today’s Atlas is not an ICBM. That modern combination of American and Russian parts only launches satellites.

The Russian missile that was called Satan in the west, but the Dnepr in Russia, was built to be an ICBM and was intended to nuke American cities. Now the Russians use it to launch American and European satellites into orbit—and they make a good profit on the business.

And while humans haven’t gotten past low earth orbit since 1972, our unmanned probes have visited every planet in the solar system except for Pluto—and New Horizons will reach that dwarf planet in 2015. Three satellites now orbit Mars, one orbits Venus, and one orbits Mercury. Another satellite orbits Saturn, after having landed a probe on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Another satellite—Juno—is on its way to Jupiter. It will become the second satellite sent there, following in the footsteps of the eight yearlong mission of Galileo. A robotic rover has been puttering about on Mars since 2004, and a second, much larger rover is scheduled for arrival at the beginning of August. There is a satellite in orbit around the asteroid Vesta. After a year or so there, it will depart and travel to Ceres, the largest of the asteroids. Four probes are on their way out of the Solar System, heading into interstellar space after finishing flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The Hubble Space Telescope, along with other giant space telescopes, have studied the heavens and returned breathtaking images, which are not only beautiful, but give scientists valuable data about the universe. The Kepler mission is actively seeking to find Earth-like planets orbiting around other stars. Since its launch, it has discovered more than 2000 new extra-solar planets, including some that indeed may resemble the Earth. Scientists now estimate that there are more planets in the universe than there are stars, with perhaps a billion just in our galaxy that are in their star’s habitable zones.

Humans continue to venture into space, and soon it won’t just be the governments of Russia, China and the U.S. sending them there. Private enterprises will soon open space to the rest of us. Bigelow Aerospace of Nevada has two privately financed and launched test modules for inflatable space stations in orbit right now. Their first human-rated space station is set to go up on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in 2014. Meanwhile, SpaceX successfully sent their Dragon spaceship to the International Space Station and brought it back down safely. They now have a contract to deliver at least twelve cargo vessels to the station. It won’t be long before they start launching people into orbit—and beyond. Within a year, Virgin Galactic will be taking space tourists into suborbital space.

The future never turns out exactly the way we anticipate. But all things considered, the future of 1969—our present—isn’t so bad. We just take it all for granted.

Send to Kindle