The need to follow through with plans to send humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars and beyond is vitally important for the prospects of humanities survival indefinitely into the future. In short, we need bold space efforts to unite the United States, and indeed the global community as never before behind the rallying point of eternal continued progress of human civilization.

The dangerous prospects of a humanity isolated to the Earth will make the human race vulnerable to global nuclear war, global warming and potentially catastrophic climate change, the possibility that some ideological rogue nation or terrorist group will gin up the final biological species extinguishing bio-warfare agent and the list goes on.
The more space based colonies that humanity produces, the more likely it is that humanity would survive such an Earth-based calamity.

As a Catholic middle aged man, I see the spreading of human civilization ever further out into the cosmos as an ultimate pro-life objective that any one of any faith or lack thereof can relate to, especially us space heads who grew up during the Apollo Program era.

However, we must not delude ourselves with notions that mankind will not go extinct on Earth or that it is not possible for mankind to go extinct in this world. There are several prominent Catholic theologians and writers who feel the same way. Even the Late Pope John Paul II has written in his encyclicals of the potential for humanity to become extinct in a burnt out grave yard of nuclear fallout.

Whereas trying to find a common religious doctrine or theme to unite all of humanity has failed miserably up to this point, perhaps letting or desiring to let persons freely choose their own belief systems guided by natural law and respect for human life at all stages in its development while at the same time promoting some grand eternal scheme of eternal human scientific, technological, philosophical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, psychological, and economic progress is the way to go.

What better way to unite all of humanity than the ideal of humanities eternal exploration of the perhaps infinite void of space-time, a void which is mysterious and presents the possibility of continued discovery, and which in the eternal scheme of things, permits an infinite number of human beings to be procreated, wherein in theory, each human being can have his or her own unique experiences or personality traits and other psychodynamic aspects within their psychic realities for which we see dimly and intangibly in each human person, a unique and unrepeatable human soul.

The risk of staying Earthbound is too great, the potential rewards of mankind’s eternal progress in this world are much to promising not to support whatever programs of manned exploration that can be undertaken. Thus, I feel realistically, NASA’s budget should be increased to perhaps $40 billion/year or even $60 billion/year. NASA should definitely be encouraged to go ahead with the ARES I and ARES V rocket programs. We have to start somewhere and it might as well be back to moon as a first step forward.