Richard Garriott gave a presentation at SXSW earlier this year, entitled The New Golden Age of Human Spaceflight. The good folks over at SXSW have kindly released a video recording of the presentation, and have briefly summarized it on the SXSW website proper:

If you are like me and you grew up during the Apollo space mission and watching movies like Space Camp, then there’s a very high chance that you wanted to be an astronaut at some point. And at another point, that dream disappeared. Enter the SXSW 2013 presentation from Richard Garriott titled “The New Golden Age of Human Spaceflight”. All of the sudden, my childhood memories came flooding back and l was left with one desire: get to space!

Garriott had that same desire and on October 12, 2008, he made it up to space as a private citizen. To date, there are nearly 540 people that have made the trek. And with the growing private/public partnerships as well as finding new ways to streamline costs, it’s becoming increasingly possible for a person to fulfill that dream.

Orbiting the earth’s cool and all, but that can’t really be the end game, right? As Garriott reminds us, we’ve been doing that for years, we need to start pushing the envelope again. The idea of exploration drives our imagination, inspires us dream big, and that’s how we push our technological limits. Garriott’s 30-year plan is the perfect reminder that we should never stop reaching for the stars!

Do watch the whole thing if you have an hour to spare.