FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for January 13, 2025

The space race was a political battle between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Once we won it, we lost interest in continuing space exploration. I was born before man walked on the moon. Generations have been born SINCE man walked on the moon. There are more people alive today who were born after the last Apollo mission than before Apollo 11.

If we are going to colonize the moon or Mars or anything else other than low Earth orbit, we’ll have to have a reason. Politics isn’t enough. In fact, politics works against it, “Why spend money in space when there is so much to do here?”

There has to be an economic reason for it. Asteroids contain many precious metals that, once there, are literally laying around on the surface (and throughout the rocks). The moon has a higher concentration of deuterium than Earth for some reason. Deuterium is the fuel for fusion reactors.