There’s a very friendly article toward NewSpace in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required, sorry) based on the reporter’s interview with Clark Lindsey. It notes the disconnect between the science-fiction reality in which we live in many respects, and the woefully slower pace of space development, relative to what we thought we’d have:

…the Pluto debate was another unhappy reminder that except for a few astronauts, we’re stuck down here on Earth long after sci-fi paperbacks predicted we would have been occupying moon bases or exploring Mars or mining asteroids. It’s not as if we haven’t seen an enormous amount of technological progress in recent decades. In some ways, we live in a science-fiction world: We carry massive music collections in our pockets, conduct real-time conversations with people across the globe for fractions of a cent and can spend hours playing (and even making money) in hypnotically detailed virtual worlds. Pure cyberpunk, down to the jihadis exchanging deadly tips on hidden message boards.

But at the same time, the science fiction of “out there” seems stillborn — 25 years after the first space shuttle took off, it’s news if it returns with all aboard safe and sound. Space elevators and moon bases? C’mon, kid: Your square-jawed rocket engineers of future histories past are now tattooed, pierced software engineers coding social-networking sites. Pluto’s a faraway place in more ways than one.

Or is that too pessimistic? Is there another way into space, one that isn’t dependent on the fitful attention of big government and the iffy performance of big bureaucracies?

Clark S. Lindsey, for one, is optimistic. Mr. Lindsey is a Java programmer and space enthusiast who runs the blog www.spacetransportnews.com. Last summer, a Real Time column being decidedly mopey about the future prompted a letter from him, contending that we’re at the start of a private-industry-led era in space development, one that would develop more quickly than many disappointed sci-fi fans like me thought. (His letter, and other reflections on space exploration, are available here.)

…As sketched out by Mr. Lindsey, it sounds convincing — aided, perhaps, by the fact that I desperately want to believe it. Once thing that does seem certain is this: If we’re to shed our disappointment, we have to let go of space exploration as it was, and accept how it will be. Don’t think of the race to the moon as a first step to Mars and beyond — that’s a perspective best left to history books that will be written centuries from now, if we’re lucky. Instead, consider the space race of the 1960s a mutation of cold-war competition, a peaceful contest that caught the imagination of a more-uniform society that united behind it. Put that big-government model from your mind, and the relatively small scale of private-sector efforts to get into orbit may catch your imagination, instead of just arousing cynicism and disappointment.