People who aren’t for space exploration just boggle my mind. Like, where did you come from?

I think their largest issue is that they subscribe to a version of folk economics called the zero sum fallacy — the mistaken belief that there’s a fixed pot of money somewhere, and if a few percent is devoted to space exploration then that magically takes it away from somewhere else.

But that’s not how it works at the governmental level or anywhere else outside of your checking account. Just look at the military budget to ascertain the truth of this statement.

In the end, most people in places and times were and would have been and are against exploration of any sort. It’s hard and often unrewarding, and deadly dangerous.

One of my favorite quotes is from the JFK’s Rice Stadium Moon speech. It is: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

To many people, trying is just not cool. But hard things are worth doing — sometimes just because they are hard.