Wagon Train to Mars

When Gene Roddenberry pitched his idea for “Star Trek” to paramount pictures he called it “Wagon Train to the Stars”—a twist on a popular western television series in the 50s called “Wagon Train” which chronicled the drama of intrepid pioneers that ventured into the unknown mystery of the wild west. Roddenberry’s idea was that someday in the future there would be a next generation of explorers and frontiersmen that would set out across the vast expanse of space to homestead new worlds.

In the 60s President John F. Kennedy tasked America to put a man on the moon and in only a few short years that dream became a reality. I have an old magazine from the 70s called “Future”; the magazine predicted we would follow in Neil Armstrong’s footsteps to be on Mars by the 90s and well on our way out of the solar system by now.

Somehow we’ve lost that spirit of discovery and adventure and have even let it degrade to the point of cynicism. John F. Kennedy could never have imagined an America that would mothball the space agency that should have been one of his greatest legacies, or that Americans would scoff at entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Elon Musk, who are putting the future of space exploration on their financial backs to get people back into space.

In case you haven’t heard about Mars One, it is a privately-funded venture whose goal is to send a few dozen volunteers selected from more than 200,000 applicants on a one-way trip to the red planet by 2024.

These would-be Martian homesteaders have met as much ridicule and disbelief as I imagine some of the first people to set out from the East coast to head West. These early pioneers set out on their own “one way trip” to a land of danger that used to be the untamed territories that now see Starbucks where once there were only lonely trading posts. Before them, the people who sailed across oceans—on what some called suicide missions—to find new continents probably met the same skepticism, but were driven regardless of the seemingly insurmountable odds to see a new sunrise.

You see, it is in our DNA as humans and Americans to challenge ourselves by breaking the bonds of the world we know to see a new horizon beyond the borders of what we previously called home, or in the immortal words of Gene Roddenberry, “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”