There is more space-exploration work underway today than there has been since the 1960s, and arguably even more than there was in those days, when everything was new and politicians turned on the money spigots for more. Robotic probes are sending back new knowledge almost daily from the icy bodies at the outer reaches of the Solar System—Pluto, Ceres, Enceladus—and from the rocky planets closer to home.
At least seven human-spaceflight vehicles are in development, plus a new Saturn V-class launch vehicle with the explicit goal of landing astronauts on Mars. At the 2015 Von Braun Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, the prospects for a revitalized space program were more promising than they have been since engineers and technicians at nearby Marshall Space Flight Center were cranking out the designs and early hardware for a new generation of exploration vehicles called Constellation a decade ago.
That came to a screeching halt, of course, with the change in administration in 2009, and the painful genesis of the new space policy that is only now beginning to bear fruit. There will be another presidential election exactly one year from now, on Nov. 8, 2016, and the spaceflight faithful assembled on the campus of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) were clearly worried that history will repeat itself.
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