It is an exciting time to be a space enthusiast. After the amazing highs of the space race of the 1960s and moon landings into the early 1970s, the exploration of space has been a sad afterthought in the American conversation. The Space Shuttle was interesting, but it never went anywhere we hadn’t already been and became so tired, uninteresting, and quite frankly, cost inefficient that the entire enterprise was scrapped by President Bush in 2004. The last Shuttle flight was in 2011. Since then, NASA has depended on the Russian space program and then SpaceX and other private companies to accomp…