Writestream Radio Network

For people who grew up in the middle of the 20th Century, space travel/exploration has been something of a disappointment since the lunar landings of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The promises of commercial space travel, promoted in such feature films as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODDESSY have never been realized, and man's toehold in space has been limited to near-earth ventures like the International Space Station (ISS) and the American Space Shuttle program that was shut down several years ago. In a word, disappointing. However, the 21st Century has finally begun to deliver on the promises made by people like President John F. Kennedy and Werner von Braun, thanks to a number of pioneering commercial space ventures that are rapidly beginning to deliver results. Companies like Orbital Sciences and SpaceX, are already providing resupply and retrieval services to NASA for the ISS. And sometime in 2017, SpaceX will fly their first manned mission aboard their own U.S.-built Falcon 9 rocket. These rapid a