Forty years ago today man took his first steps on another world, but I always feel a bit melancholy when we discussing the trip to the moon. Is it better to have done something great and then stopped or to have never done it at all?

I strongly believe that expansion is vital for humanity as a species. It isn't just because it is how we protect ourselves from natural disasters and even wars but because it gives those who want true freedom a choice. The freedoms of America largely exist because those who came here were free of the ideas and the rules of Europe.

Yet we haven't even bothered to go back to the moon in almost a generation and if we don't move soon those men who can give us their experience on what happened will be gone.

What has happened, I fear, is that we no longer have governments willing to take risks. We'll spend trillions on bailouts but not on a failed trip to the moon because if the trip to the moon failed everyone would know.

Eventually we will return to the moon and do the other things that Kennedy was talking about in his famous speech because someone, perhaps our children or grandchildren will recognise that the only things really worth doing are difficult.

We need to start thinking big again, to remember that we can accomplish anything, to understand that there is more to life than comfort and that the easy path is rarely the right path.

P.s. Thank you to those who have worked on the space program now and then. You are doing one of the most important things humans have ever done and mostly in obscurity.