Here’s a cool little item that I was planning to include in my recent round-up of space news, but somehow missed; it’s a promotional trailer (ostensibly put out by NASA) hyping the planned return of human beings to the Moon:

I’ll be honest, I am somewhat ambivalent about NASA’s current plans for human spaceflight. I’m sad that the shuttle is going to be retired in a couple of years, even though it never lived up to the breathless fantasies that surrounded its debut in the 1970s (I still have a book I was given as a Christmas present when I was a kid that predicts the shuttles — the design of which was then still being flight-tested by the prototype Enterprise — would make spaceflight almost as routine and simple as what we see in Star Wars. Um, yeah. What can I say? It was a far more optimistic age, kids.) I think the International Space Station is something of a boondoggle, a project we feel obligated to finish because we’ve invested so much in it, but which never had a clear purpose to begin with. And the official Vision for Space Exploration — i.e., the plan put forth by President Bush to send Americans back to the Moon and then later on Mars — strikes me in many ways as high-flown rhetoric that may or may not actually amount to anything. (This guy, for instance, believes the whole thing will be abandoned within seven years and is more about trying to recapture the former glory of the old Apollo missions than any kind of compelling reason to actually return to the Moon.)

And yet, while I have my doubts about practical details and official policies, I remain an unabashed enthusiast for the idea of putting people out there in the black. In my book, human spaceflight, while immensely risky and expensive, is also the noblest, most exciting adventure that remains for our species. I think it is inevitable that we will one day spread out into our system, and possibly even our galaxy, first as explorers and then as settlers. The way things are going, I think most of those explorers and settlers are likely to be Chinese or maybe Indian. Don’t misunderstand — I don’t begrudge other nations going into space and having their own accomplishments. It’s a big star system, after all. But I never feel quite as patriotic as I do when it comes to space exploration, and I don’t want to believe our cosmic glory days ended with Neil Armstrong. It troubles me that the kids coming up these days — the ones who, realistically, will have to decide whether or not to go back out there, and certainly whether to go to stay — appear to be so utterly indifferent to the whole space thing.

Maybe if somebody can get this trailer into movie theaters, or onto DVDs or television, it could break through the apathy shields of the iPod generation and get a few of them thinking.

Or maybe not. After all, the big moment in this trailer is an astronaut plugging in an extension cord. Even I have to admit that this is a less-than-inspiring image.

But this trailer is a step in the right direction, perhaps. To whoever made it, more please. And, as George Lucas reputedly tells his actors, “Faster. More intense.”

My thanks to Bad Astronomy for posting this a while back.