Since I was a little kid, I have been doing the math in my head and dreaming of a Pan Am flight to a

Written: June 13, 2026

Since I was a little kid, I have been doing the math in my head and dreaming of a Pan Am flight to a Von Braun wheel space station.
Christmas 1979, a great aunt gave me a bunch of old NASA educational materials, maps, and posters. To me, *2001: A Space Odyssey* was not science fiction. It was a sneak peek. It felt like something right around the corner.
Of course, when you are 5 years old, you have no idea that the whole dream depends on everything going perfectly. No hiccups. No budget cuts. No politics. No disasters.
I did not realize it at the time, and I do not think most of America really did either, but Skylab was kind of a glorious cock-up. It reached orbit looking like it had been in a fender bender, and then three crews went up there and lived in the busted thing anyway.
But Skylab taught us something real. Living in space was not just about surviving the vacuum. It was about floating around, trying to work, eat, sleep, move, and use the bathroom when everything takes twice as long and nothing stays where you put it.
Then came the Space Shuttle.
Imagine being 5 years old, already convinced that putting crews in orbit had become routine, and suddenly here comes this brilliant white futuristic spaceship called a "shuttle."
Shuttle?
Holy crap. That word alone made it sound like we were basically there. Like Pan Am just needed to order a fleet and we would all be booking orbit vacations by the time we were grown-ups.
Then Challenger happened.
That did not just destroy a spacecraft. It took a baseball bat to the future I thought was coming. NASA kept going, but the dream was different after that. Then Columbia came apart on reentry, and by then the public could clearly see it: these were not simple space buses. These were dangerous, aging, miraculous machines.
They stopped painting the main fuel tank white, and the shuttle started flying with that big rusty-orange tank like some kind of rat rod to the stars.
Then it all petered out.
Some shuttles were blown up. The rest were parked in museums. The "shuttle" never became a shuttle. The spinning wheel space hotel never came. Pan Am never took us to orbit.
And now I look around and see SpaceX valued at roughly the annual GDP of Canada.
You could look at that and say, "That is the madness of capitalism."
I look at it and think, "Oh. I was not the only dreamer."
The whole planet has now put a price tag on how important spaceflight is. If alien accountants landed tomorrow and asked humanity, "How much do you people have invested in getting off this rock?" we could point to a map, circle a huge beautiful country full of forests, minerals, cities, lakes, and natural resources, and say:
"That much."
So maybe that was the arc all along.
The old NASA programs, with all their budget fights, ideology fights, political speeches, public failures, and impossible engineering, were necessary. They built the road. They proved humans could live and work up there. They turned science fiction into infrastructure.
And then capitalism showed up, looked at the road, and said:
"Can we make this a business?"
Maybe that is the strange answer to the dream I had as a kid. NASA did not fail because Pan Am never flew me to a wheel station. NASA got us far enough that the next wave of dreamers could pick up the tools and start building again.
We were promised the stars.
We got busted space stations, lost crews, museum shuttles, rusty fuel tanks, and a whole lot of heartbreak.
But somehow, the dream survived.
And now the accountants are saying it might be worth a Canada.