The Drive of Curiosity

In the beginning, it was this. Tiny two man pods. Barely something you would call a spacecraft. We would throw ourselves upward on rockets we didn't trust. We would come back down with unreliable parachutes. Yet we didn't fear, or at least not too much. We kept pushing, and that led us further.....

Then we came here. It really was a giant leap for mankind. Going to our moon. It felt like we were reaching far out into the universe. We were, truly, going where no one had gone before. We looked down on our planet and realized we were but a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam. We realized that the universe was much bigger than we had expected.....

Once we had realized that we weren't going to conquer Rome in a day, we set about thinking about how to get about it. We improved our technology. We gained experience. We put more and more people into space.

Then we started to learn how to live in space. We did experiments, we built a space telescope, we built space station after space station. However, try as they could, our governments couldn't bear the burden alone. Space was expensive, but like all things, money is to be made where new industries are started.....

So next we have this. Many people see it as discouraging, as something that will slow us down. But it is the exact opposite. It is the expansion the space industry needs. We will no longer have to rely on governments and their tight budgets to explore space. We will be able to develop new and better technologies, move more people into space, and start making space look like the real final frontier of humanity. Today we have capsules and small re-usable spacecraft, tomorrow we will have space ports and space stations, in the very near future we will have colonies on other planets and moons......

And from there it is only into the wild black yonder. Into interstellar space. Ships that can travel across great distances very quickly. First, like the early space travel, research missions. Pure science, probably funded by governments. But then, just like the space programs of today, it will grow and expand......

.......into this. New worlds, new systems, and eventually maybe even new galaxies. We will be able to look back at Earth and our home system with the fondness of a childhood home. We will be able to remember the sweet taste of when we were just taking our first steps into space. And then we will be able to look at all that is still ahead. Not just the exploration of our solar system, not just the hurdles of deep space travel or interstellar travel, but to the true exploration of the universe. Finding other life, finding other races.

All of this started when the first humans laid out at night and looked at the stars, and wondered. They got curious about what was out there. They felt so tiny under those little lights so far away.

So they decided to see what was out there.