To Infinity and Beyond

"I'm convinced that when we go to Mars, we should go to the moons of Mars first," Aldrin said. That would be Phobos and Deimos. The moon man has a thing about moons, maybe.

Standing next to Aldrin was movie director James Cameron. Cameron wants to go to outer space. He's ridden the "vomit comet," the jet that uses parabolic arcs to simulate weightlessness among passengers. He would be thrilled to visit Mars. He said we have to become multi-planetary, just to survive. "If we discovered a comet nucleus or an asteroid on an impact course with Earth, we could do exactly what the dinosaurs did, and we could stare upward with a dumb look on our faces. We need to evolve beyond the dinosaurs," he had told the conference audience minutes earlier. NASA should enlist the media and Hollywood to make the space program more visually dramatic, Cameron told me in the hall. The Mars rovers ought to be on TV. We've seen what the rovers see, but not the rovers themselves. Imagine "Titanic" through Leonardo DiCaprio's eyes without seeing DiCaprio.

I said it sounds as though he wants the space program to be more like a movie.

"Okay. Yes! And they should embrace that."

But why do all this stuff? Why go to the moon again, or Mars, or any of these difficult, faraway, airless, cold, lifeless places?

"It's who we are," said the movie director.

So here's the headline from Disney World: Space is back. The space buffs are reenergized, and they're coming up with schemes that will blow your mind.

They're inventing rockets that might get us to Mars in less than three months.

They're drawing up plans for elevators that could transport cargo into space without any rockets at all -- just hit the "Up" button.

They're diagramming a giant sling that could hurl moon rocks into lunar orbit.

They want to build habitation modules inside lava caves on the moon.

They would like to deploy little exploratory "microbots" that would bounce all over the moon like jumping beans.