Turning Dust to Gold: Building a Future on the Moon and Mars [Paperback]

The expansion of our civilization to the Moon and beyond is now within our reach, technically, intellectually and financially. Apollo was not our last foray into the Solar System and already science fiction is finding it difficult to keep ahead of science and engineering fact. In 1807, few people anticipated the Wright Brothers human flight a hundred years later. In 1869, only science fiction writers would have suggested landing people on the Moon in 1969. Similarly, other great inventions in mechanics and in electronics were not envisaged and therefore the technologies to which those inventions gave birth were only foreseen by a tiny group of visionaries.

Two important factors have given rise to mankinds successful evolution into space: the first is that the possibilities are bounded only by our imaginations  if we can conceive it, historically it has been proved that we can do it, and in a predetermined timescale. The second factor is recognition of the evolving civilizations on the Moon and Mars as separate entities from Earth.

Space, whether we or our children live in it or on the Moon or Mars, will be important to all of us, not only to aerospace engineers and cosmologists, because of the new opportunities for freedom and limitless growth it offers. Our continued prosperity and survival as a species will in part depend upon space exploration and the resources it provides for our industrial societies and for the markets it will create. The expansion of Earths success in science and culture to the Moon, then Mars, and eventually the Solar System, can only strengthen mankinds core positive achievements: democracy, individual rights and equal opportunities forl³"