The ultimate goal of the strategy is to foster the development of humanity into a true space society. What this means is that the strategy will produce a human spaceflight infrastructure that will not only make space an accessible and integrated part of humanity's realm, but that it will be seen as being so by the people of the world. A space society is one that views the heavens as an integral part of, and not separate from, the affairs of the Earth.

Such a society is not just one capable of utilizing space materially. It is a state of mind, one that sees the Earth as a part of a greater Universe. Within this perspective, our world does not just include our planet but also the entire space environment as a single "greater Earth". This new concept of our place in the cosmos will not only reap the tangible benefits described in the first chapter of this report, but also the more intangible ones of broadening our frontiers and expanding our consciousness.

Some have argued that our future in space may be one in which the Solar System is explored and exploited robotically, with minimal human presence in space. They reason that despite the material wealth of space, people will never want to live there permanently because it is so desolate compared to Earth. But this is just a matter of perspective, a skewed viewpoint of people bound to the home planet. Consider a child born and raised on the Moon or Mars. Would this child see the Earth as a paradise compared to their barren world, or a frightening place where people can actually hurt themselves when they fall down?

The authors believe that the implementation of the strategy detailed in this report will lay the foundation for not just the human exploration of space, but also for its utilization and eventual permanent settlement. It would be interesting to consider some of the implications of such a space society. With the vast resources of the Solar System at their disposal, will space settlers completely reject the Malthusian limits to consumption and become the ultimate "throw away" society? Or will people become ultra-conservationists, recognizing the need to ration and recycle everything within closed-loop life support systems in challenging environments? Perhaps miners on isolated asteroid stations will become absolute cleanliness freaks; a messy room could lead to a clogged air vent, with potentially fatal results. Ultimately, the reasons for maintaining a space society will be ones we cannot imagine today. Europeans came to North America for fish and beaver pelts. How many of them could have imagined Silicon Valley?

To conclude, consider the following analogy. A person lives in a house or apartment at some street address that they consider home. But that person may also think of their neighborhood to be their home. The neighborhood is in a city that the person sees as their "home town", and this city is in a nation that the person thinks of as "their" country. Finally, more and more forward thinking people are now at last seeing the entire globe as "the home planet".

The Earth is, and always will be, the first home of humanity. But space will be our neighborhood, our city, our nation, and our world -- it will become home as well. In the coming decades, the human race will follow the steps of this strategy and settle the Moon, Mars, and most of the inner Solar System. In the centuries to come, humanity will begin to explore and perhaps settle many of the star systems in this part of the Galaxy. But even when we are so far out of the cradle, people will still look back to this planet and to this time with a sense of wonder -- the time and place from which we began our strategy for human exploration away from Earth, and became a true space society.

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