by Chris Tobias

“Well… here I am.” — Jubal Early, Firefly “Objects in Space”

Yes, here we are. Another year is behind us, and a new year lies ahead.

If you haven’t already, it’s a pretty safe bet that over the next several days you’ll be bombarded with all manner of retrospective pieces about the year that was 2014. That’s appropriate, of course. It was quite a year, with more than its fair share of highs and lows. Those who have been following developments in the space industry are probably familiar with more than a few of them: ISS missions and their commercial resupply flights, ESA’s Rosetta, the disastrous Antares launch and the tragic Virgin Galactic crash, the unveiling of SpaceX’s DragonV2, the awarding of NASA’s Commercial Crew contracts, etc. While it’s always good to take a moment or two to look back on where you’ve been and see how far you’ve come, we’d like to keep the focus of this first post of the New Year on what lies ahead for Take Back the Sky in 2015.

OUR TIME IS NOW

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the motion picture Serenity, the movie that was the realization of a dream for Joss Whedon and the fulfillment of Browncoats’ wishes the world over in that it provided a measure of closure to the story that was begun in the television series Firefly while laying the groundwork for future adventures of Serenity and her crew. That fact alone should be reason enough to believe that 2015 is the perfect time for those of us who want to convince SpaceX that their first manned Dragon capsule should bear the name Serenity to step up our efforts, both to recruit still more Browncoats to our cause and to convince Elon Musk and SpaceX of its worthiness. But nostalgia for the film’s tenth anniversary is hardly the only thing that will be motivating us this year.

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