It was indeed naive for us to think that Apollo’s technologies would lead to Pan Am Clippers to space… just as it was naive to imagine that Apollo was about opening a door to the space frontier, as opposed to punching a tiny hole in the wall before the Soviets did.

That said, the instinctive American view of space as a place we should be able to go is not wrong… it was simply wrong to think that we could get there on bureaucratic autopilot.

I could substitute ’68, when I was 18 and few questioned the trajectory implied by the Pan Am orbital shuttle in 2001. (Pan Am was a commercial airline of the day, young’uns.) Of course private enterprise would pick up the technology and run with it, and of course it would get better and cheaper and more versatile as aviation had, and of course new markets would burgeon as it did.

As far as I can see, most space fans still take that alternate history as their default — i.e., it should and would have happened if NASA (or Congress) (or cheapskate Nixon, or technology-hating liberals) (or a feckless public) hadn’t derailed it.

Me, I think those are comforting fables: that the space technologies of 1968 really did have — and have today — a lot less headroom for order-of-magnitude improvements than those of aviation in 1910. Ditto for the economics of space access vs. those of nascent aviation markets. But I am encouraged that some, like you, are willing to look squarely at how hard it is and stick with it anyway.