I’d like you to think about a moment when you really connected with space.
A moment when you felt your place in the Cosmos. Humans throughout history have had these moments: from turning the stars into lore around the fire in our earliest days, to watching the Apollo 11 Moon landing on a neighbor’s black-and-white TV, to looking through a telescope and seeing Saturn for the first time. That special moment of connection to outer space — it’s different for each of us, but I suspect everyone reading this has a story.
My own moment is from when Pathfinder landed on Mars in 1997, later renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.
In 1997, it had been 20 years since there had been a successful Mars landing. There was a lot of build up about our return to the Red Planet. The Planetary Society held a big party that we call Planetfest. I had been an employee here for 6 months.
I sat amongst about 5,000 people in a convention center staring at a giant screen with a feed from Pathfinder mission control, all of us practically holding our collective breath as we waited for confirmation of a successful landing. And when it came, there were cheers and tears on the big screen and cheers and tears in the room. It was thrilling.
But what happened next captured my heart forever. The first image started coming down, and we watched as the data filled in little by little. I recognized in that moment that I was experiencing space exploration. That no one had ever seen what we were now seeing and that made us the explorers.
Space exploration is what The Planetary Society was built for — it’s what we celebrate, it’s what we champion. Bold, scientific space missions that show us the unseen, answer deep questions, and lead us to new mysteries.
The last couple of decades have been remarkable. Some describe it as a golden age of exploration. But as we look to the future, we see a challenging road ahead: after decades of progress, the future of space science and exploration is in jeopardy. Budgets are tightening. Priorities are shifting. Cuts are threatening to downsize, delay, or even cancel missions. It’s not exactly the same situation as 1980 — when Carl Sagan, Louis Friedman, and Bruce Murray founded our organization to prove public support for planetary exploration when Congress claimed there was none — but there are troubling similarities.
Our founding premise still holds true today: people from around the world — people like you and me — want and expect scientific exploration to continue.
The Planetary Society’s objective is straightforward: we want to explore more, discover more, and understand more about the Cosmos and our place within it. And how we do that is what makes The Planetary Society so special. It’s through our members and the global community of explorers we are building every day.
So what do we need to be successful in this next era?
We need people. We need more members, supporters, and partners joining our mission so that we can continue to prove that the world’s enthusiasm for space science and exploration is only getting stronger.
We need action. Action takes many forms. Learning more and sharing more about space science and exploration — that’s action. Participating in our Annual Day of Action or petition campaigns, crowdfunding new research and technology development, giving a Planetary Academy membership to a young person in your life — that’s all action. And when combined with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of other people, we have power to influence and shape the future.
We need to lead. We will continue to lead with independence, with credibility, and with collaboration to shape the future that we want to see. The Planetary Society has the unique role to bridge divides and bring people together; we can problem solve and influence action with no hidden motivations or special interests other than the shared goal of our mission. We will be bold, loud, optimistic, and kind, and we will make sure humanity’s knowledge of the Cosmos keeps advancing.
That moment I invited you to think of at the start of this writing — that moment is part of you. It’s part of why you’re here today and why you’re part of The Planetary Society. There’s power in our collective passion. Future exploration won’t just happen by accident. It will happen because people like us believed in exploration, championed it, and made it real.
Because the greatest discoveries aren’t behind us — they’re still out there, waiting.
Let’s keep exploring!
Jenn Vaughn
CEO, The Planetary Society