To remain a great nation in the 21st century, America must become a true spacefaring nation to enable the wealth-generation potential of the Earth-Moon frontier to be effectively utilized.  Becoming a true commercial seafaring nation was instrumental to America's century-long rise to great nation status in the 1800's. Our national focus must now be repeated to establish American commercial leadership in opening the Earth-Moon frontier.

America is not yet a true spacefaring nation in the sense that Americans, as spacefarers, do not yet have the ability to routinely, frequently, and safely travel to and within space and to live and work in space. These circumstances reflect the continued focus of America's human space enterprise on space exploration and science. Becoming a true spacefaring nation wil require initiating a new era of the space age focused on mastering industrial operations in space to exploit the new knowledge gained from America's human and robotic space explorations.

The first step in crossing the threshhold to this new spacefaring era is for Americans to think of themselves of spacefarers -- to hold expectations that all Americans wishing to engage in space commerce should have the ability to routinely, frequently, and safely travel to and within space and to live and work in space. From this new way of looking at America's future, the need to establish new spacefaring logistics capabilities to support American spacefarers becomes the next logical step in America's transformation into a true spacefaring nation.

Creating the needed spacefaring logistics infrastructure will be the 21st century version of building the Transcontinental Railroad, Panama Canal, and Interstate Highway System. Building this spacefaring infrastructure will require a new public-private partnership, such as America used to open many new physical and virtual frontiers in the last two centuries. Thinking now as spacefarers, we clearly see the need to do this again to begin to open the Earth-Moon frontier.