One aspect of the space economy tends to get overlooked: weather. Without space, we'd be in trouble.

It really wasn’t that long ago when the two greatest superpowers were vying to put satellites into space. Now, 50 nations have their own satellites in low Earth orbit. If you’re a Thailand, say, you can call Space Systems/Loral, a Canadian-owned company based in Palo Alto, California, and tell them you want to put a satellite into geostationary orbit for television broadcasting or military communications. You can have the thing in orbit 25,000 miles above Earth within two years. 

The good news: current leadership is working on renewing NASA.

The bad news: they’re working without the audacious national mission we need. It’s as if NASA is a boxer training without any fight scheduled.