As an ISU alumnus who has dedicated my entire career to expanding our nation’s efforts in space, I found the Daily’s editorial on Nov. 13, “U.S. must reboot space exploration,” very disappointing for its lack of awareness of what’s happening with our nation’s space efforts now.

Thanks to an excellent launch from Iowa State, I was fortunate to have worked on the earliest satellites deployed from the space shuttle, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Voyager missions to the outer planets and several pioneering commercial space efforts, yet right now is more exciting than all of that. Why?

Primarily it’s because the former “space race” you allude to with pangs of nostalgia was completed decades ago, and the new space race — coined “NewSpace” — is in full swing, and the U.S. is leading this, well, by a mile.

Our nation’s “space program” is not just what NASA does, but what all of its citizens do to advance our interests in space. Remember: Space is a place, not a government program.

NewSpace is all about applying the known forces of entrepreneurialism and capitalism to space market segments heretofore defined and dominated by government entities (in the United States, NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Defense, etc.). These top-down, centrally planned organizations, while capable of accomplishing great things when working with the established pseudo-commercial military-industrial aerospace community, have been largely unable to define any sort of cost-effective, sustainable methods for doing so over the long run.

Meanwhile, in 1997, commercial space activity worldwide first became the dominant component — i.e., less than 50 percent — of global space markets — mostly communications and data satellites — and for the past decade or so stabilized around two-thirds of the entire $200 billion-plus global space economy.

To be sure, NASA’s charter is all about exploration. But for most of my working career NASA was operating the shuttle program, and never figured out how to do it cost-effectively or reliably.

Now, fortunately, NASA is out of that “routine” business that it never should have been doing in the first place. Cargo deliveries to the International Space Station have been turned over to commercial firms, and commercial crew delivery is only a few years away. Private trips to orbit have already happened, and private suborbital trips for research, education and adventure-tourism will start in 2014. Commercially developed and operated laboratories and facilities in Earth orbit and at the moon are being seriously discussed, commercially developed reusable rockets are being tested, and roadmaps are being defined by commercial space firms to deliver humans to Mars. NASA might well be an anchor customer for many of these efforts.

Similar trends toward more commercial approaches are underway with NOAA and the DOD for acquiring weather data and military communications capability, respectively.

For a hint of what’s to come in space, think about what happened when the U.S. Postal Service was augmented by FedEx and UPS, or when IBM mainframes, Bell Telephone and ARPANET were replaced by PCs, cellphones and the Internet.

Rightly so, NASA is focused once again on doing the truly hard things, like landing capable rovers on Mars, orbiting Saturn and Mercury, detecting planets around other stars, searching for life on Enceladus and sending crews beyond the moon. This is the sort of stuff NASA should do and industry largely can’t do — yet.

The Europeans, Japan, India, China and Russia are making progress with their solar system-exploration programs — often in partnership with NASA — but are barely on the NewSpace radar. And contrary to the claim in the editorial, India is attempting its first Mars orbiter mission — it’s even called Mars Orbiter Mission, or MOM — and is years if not a decade or more away from attempting a Mars lander.

Focus on what’s coming during the next year, next decade, this century. You’ll find that it will all dwarf what has happened so far, and that the U.S. — all of it, not just NASA — will definitely be leading the charge, as is it now.

A century from now, the U.S. will likely be credited with being the catalyst for establishing human civilization beyond Planet Earth and for bringing the nearly unlimited resources of the solar system into the economic sphere of our home planet, squashing the meek “limits to Earth” mentality once and for all.

If all of this doesn’t stir, wonder and awe, wake up.