JetScootr's Journal: The end of the Space Age

Today, I saw that the space age is really over. I was driving through Nassau Bay, on the opposite side of Nasa Road One from the Johnson Space Center, and saw they were gone: a dozen or so office buildings that housed the space program contractors since the very beginning. Although NASA gets almost exclusive credit, much of the space age happened here: Martin Marietta, Lockheed, Rockwell Rocketdyne, a score or more other contractors who were the backbone of America's push into space. Humans got to the moon because of what happened here, just as much as what happened across NASA Road One. My father worked in one of them, and virtually all of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab were made possible by the scientists and engineers and managers that worked there. Now it's all empty fields being prepped for new construction. A few miles down NASA Road One is a historical marker commemorating the Japanese farmers who lived here a century ago. But no marker remains here where humankind planned the conquest of space.
There will be new contracts, new programs, of course. Eventually, we may get to the moon. My experience suggests that it won't be in the next half century, not meaningfully, anymore than our reaching the moon had real meaning a half century ago. And it won't be the same culture that does it. The space age is over, although humans' use of space is just begun.
It's also the end of my own space age. I have left NASA after 29 1/2 years, driven out by contract changes and my own personal growth and progressiveness. I no longer have the heart for government work, to try to "fix the system from within", etc. I don't know what's ahead specifically, but I'm sure I'll have more energy and enthusiasm chasing dreams that I had almost forgotten rather than those the nation has forgotten.