Now, private industry is beginning to take over what NASA once did. For $200,000 you can book a flight to the edge of space aboard SpaceShipTwo, the spaceplane being developed by Richard Branson’s company.

Sooner or later — in the year 2030, it says here — humans will return to that gray, airless landscape. “Just a three-day trip from Earth by spacecraft, the luminous Moon beckons,” the show notes in travel-brochure language….

Getting there is also going to be interesting. By then, Dr. Shara figures, we will have had enough of the violence of rockets and will descend and ascend from the lunar surface on a lunar elevator, “a skinny cable rising thousands of miles from the Moon into the sky,” anchored at the far end by the gravity of the Earth. In time, Dr. Shara said, the cable could be extended almost all the way to Earth.

– Dennis Overbye, N.Y. Times.

OK, this space-exploration exhibit at the Museum of Natural History sounds pretty awesome and in truth I’ll probably go check it out, but don’t buy that 2030 space-tourism stuff. The space museum-industrial complex has been selling that for at least 20 years, if not longer, and as far as I know we’re not really any closer to hanging out on the moon than we were in 1990 the first time it was promised to me.

You know what’s a lot cooler than a museum exhibit about human space travel? Actual human space travel. You’re killing me, science.