“Space, the final frontier.”

Few words have been heard and spoken in more languages than the introduction to Star Trek. No matter if you’re a fan of the original series, Next Generation, Enterprise or haven’t ever seen an episode, you have heard these words.

These may not have been the words that started the race for the stars, but they certainly spurred them on.

The first Star Trek episode aired in 1966, after the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, had already orbited the earth. After that the show was the embodiment of space travel and the future.

The original show stopped in 1969, the same year Neil Armstrong coined the saying, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Still the Trekkies couldn’t be stopped, and the show kept being resurrected, and is still going strong. Not only the show, but also the ideas it presented, couldn’t be stopped.

Until now.

Everyone from star gazing children to ex-NASA astronauts were startled to hear President Obama’s 2011 budget proposal. In it, the administration allots $19 billion to the NASA space program, representing a $276 billion difference from last year’s budget. This effectively kills Constellation, a Bush- era program that was based on the idea that we will get men back on the moon.

Instead NASA has been told that they are to operate with “$6 billion over five years to develop a commercial taxi to carry astronauts to the International Space Station, the life of which would be extended to 2020,” according to a story in The Washington Post.

So what will become of the starry eyed children, the kids who have grown up with the dream of becoming Captain Kirk, or discovering the Vulcans? James Cameron, director of Titanic and Avatar, says he knows in an article he wrote in The Washington Post (February 5^th, 2010); “I have gotten to know a lot of people at NASA… I've found that many, if not most, started as starry-eyed childhood dreamers… They grew up to become engineers, brilliant planetary scientists and steely-eyed missile men who collectively have pushed our human presence out to the moon and our robotic presence not just to Mars but also to the outer reaches of the solar system.”

This opening of airspace is intended to make way for more commercial space travel options, so that the average person can fly through the stars.

Though many worry that this is the end of the space age, Peter Diamandis, chairman of the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, wrote in The Huffington Post Tech (February 1^st, 2010): "The U.S. Government doesn't build your computers, nor do you fly aboard a U.S. Government owned and operated airline. Private industry routinely takes technologies pioneered by the government and turns them into cheap, reliable and robust industries.”

Yuri Gagarin, who died a mere eight years after his first and only trip into space and never saw what his achievement inspired, knew that this day might come, but still had some fighting words.

 “Spaceflights cannot be stopped. This is not the work of any one man or even a group of men. It is a historical process which mankind is carrying out in accordance with the natural laws of human development.”

So perhaps the kid sitting in the back of English class daydreaming about what he should name the alien race he intends to discover still has a chance “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”