Growing up as a young Canadian, I can credit an American president in large measure for my pursuit of things scientific and technical. I braved mosquito hordes in summer and bitter winter nights to gaze at the moon and stars through a telescope, then pursued physics in university. This was fairly typical of a generation inspired by the Apollo program. Though never remotely a direct part of it, I started my career in companion fields, from microprocessors to fiber optics and missile guidance. Many of my space-inspired generation invented and accomplished much. President Kennedy launched a four-decade era of technology revolutions.  Now with the Obama administration's decision to cancel funding for putting humans in space, America abandons a half-century of baby steps toward mankind's only frontier. We have big problems on Earth to be sure, like health care and energy, but the pursuit of space is both bigger than our Earthly tribulations and important for addressing them.  It was just two months after issuing an executive order to create the grounded and successful Peace Corps that President Kennedy delivered his epochal man-on-the-moon-within-the-decade speech on May 25, 1961. Kennedy surely had no idea how engineers would achieve his simply stated if seemingly impossible goal. Although man had already been in space many times, the moon was 2,500 times further away than distances achieved by 1961.  Space travel was, and remains, fundamentally an energy problem of both the political and physical variety. Getting to the moon required a quantum leap in technology, not the least of which was building a rocket some 20 times more powerful than existed. Perhaps more challenging, to achieve the goal the president had to energize Congress and the citizenry to take on a budget twenty-fold bigger than America's already aggressive funding of the space program. That was, even by today's standards, serious political heavy lifting.  Wireless communications and ever-smaller chips are revolutionizing tech and telecom. Join George Gilder and an elite group of investors and scientists handicapping the winners. Click here to visit the Gilder Telecosm Forum.  The technology challenge of outer space is easily illuminated. It's not so easy to build machines to get humans beyond our planetary shore. For every pound of astronaut, the astronauts' moon vehicle carried over 50,000 pounds of fuel that was consumed in about 15 minutes, exhausting enough energy to power a town of 5,000 for a month. At this ratio, your Prius would require a fuel tank weighing as much as 1,500 SUVs.  Importantly, landing on the moon was not rationalized on the basis of its practical economic benefits. Kennedy stated simply that it was "time to take longer strides--time for a great new American enterprise--time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key our future as a nation." And it did.  The moon program's effect was profound and far-reaching, inspiring an entire generation of engineers and entrepreneurs. No, they didn't all get government jobs with NASA or in private-sector companies supporting NASA to build the Saturn V rocket, the space capsule, its electronics or the moon rover and all the other related hardware. Most just found the whole idea--the pursuit itself--inspirational and pursued careers in everything from microprocessors and software to nuclear power and photovoltaics.  The dots are not so hard to connect. The U.S. economy was in liftoff mode for most of the second half of the twentieth century. While there were several contributing factors, at the core the accelerant for growth was technocentric innovation. Not space technology per se but that generation of scientists and engineers who brought an unprecedented intellectual energy and excitement to peacetime pursuits. The inventions and new companies created in the shadow of Apollo were manifold, as were the stimulating effects on established but still fast-growing companies like Boeing ( BA - news - people ), Rockwell Collins ( COL - news - people ) and Hewlett-Packard ( HPQ - news - people ), as well as companies that saw their birth or rapid expansion around the moon program like Texas Instruments ( TXN - news - people ) and Intel ( INTC - news - people ).
President Obama is making a mistake by shelving manned space exploration.  We need a space program that inspires and elevates the spirit.