Final frontier filmmaker Michael Potter
Michael Potter’s film follows a pioneering ‘new space’ dream into the heavens. Since people first escaped Earth’s atmosphere in fragile looking crafts, space has served as the new American west in the public imagination – an irresistible target of exploration to JFK, and the “final frontier” of “Star Trek” fanatics. But unlike the former frontier of the old west, where the individual’s pioneering spirit found scant restraint, the vastness of space was long filled with government designs, while access to private parties remained barred by the great expense of any non-governmental endeavor. In time, the entrepreneurial approach to space gradually intruded, with a tiny number of rich guys penetrating the weightless reaches as high-rolling tourists. Then President Obama unveiled plans for a greater privatization of the U.S. space program, pushing the entrepreneurial approach front and center, and its most visible exponent, PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, is busy penetrating the sky with his Falcon 9 rocket and filling Google News with the latest developments of his company SpaceX. But a decade before SpaceX and the Falcon 9, idiosyncratic American entrepreneur Walt Anderson popped his…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com