Spring 2001, amid the manicured lawns of the Princeton University campus, I was recumbent in an office chair with my mind in the universe when the phone rang. It was the White House. They wanted me to join a commission to study the health of the aerospace industry. I agreed, but at first I was indifferent. I don’t know how to fly an airplane. But then I read up on that sector and realized they had lost half a million jobs in recent years. Something bad was going on.

The commission’s first meeting was to be at the end of September. And then came 9/11. I live—then and now—four blocks from Ground Zero. My windows are right there. I was supposed to go to Princeton that morning, but I had some overdue writing to finish, so I stayed home. One plane goes in; another plane goes in. At that point, how indifferent could I be? I had just lost my neighborhood to two airplanes. Duty called. I was a changed person. Not only had the nation been attacked, so had my backyard.

I distinctly remember walking into the first meeting. The 11 other commissioners filled the room with testosterone. There was General this and Secretary of the Navy that and Member of Congress this. It’s not as though I have no testosterone, but it’s Bronx testosterone. The kind where, if you get into a fight on the street, you kick the guy’s butt. This I-build-missile-systems testosterone is a whole other kind. Even the women on the commission had it: A former congresswoman from the South, who had an Air Force base in her district, deployed a vocal tone perfectly tuned to say, “Kiss my ass.” Another one was chief aerospace analyst for Morgan Stanley; having grown up as a Navy brat, she had the industry by the gonads.

On that commission, we traveled the world to see what cultural or economic forces might be influencing the aerospace industry’s stability here in America. We visited China before they put a man in space. I carried with me the common stereotype of everybody’s riding bicycles along broad boulevards, but instead, Audis and Mercedes Benzes and Volkswagens filled the streets. Cars dominated the roads, not bicycles. Then I went home and looked at the labels on all my stuff; half of it had been made in China. Lots of our money was already going there.

On a side tour we visited the Great Wall. A tourist attraction, of course, but in its day, a military project. I looked far and wide but saw no evidence of technology, just the bricks that comprised the wall. As an experiment, I pulled out my cell phone and seamlessly managed to call my mother in New York. “Oh, Neil, you’re home so soon!” was her first remark. No, I was 8,000 miles away, yet that cell phone connection was the best I’ve ever had—ever. Nobody in China is uttering America’s cell phone mantra, “Can you hear me now?”

So when China announced, “We’re going to put somebody in orbit,” sure enough, I knew it was going to happen. We all knew. China says, “We want to put somebody on the moon,” I’ve got no doubts. When they say they want to put somebody on Mars, I’m certain of it. Mars is, of course, already red, so that could work well for Chinese marketing and public relations.

After China we visited Star City in Russia, outside Moscow, the administrative center of Russia’s space program. We all crammed into the office of the head of the center, and halfway through the morning he said, “Time for vodka.” The glass was so tiny that not all my fingers fit on it, and so my pinky stuck out. Apparently, in Russia you don’t drink vodka with your pinky sticking out. So once again, I was in the vicinity of a higher stratum of testosterone.

But I didn’t feel that way after our visit to Brussels. That’s where we met with European aerospace planners and executives. They had just published a document describing their 20-year aeronautics vision, plus they were working on Galileo, a satellite navigation system that would compete directly with our GPS. So we were kind of worried: What happens if they finish Galileo, equip European planes with it, and announce that we must have it to fly into European airspace? We already had an ailing industry here, and retrofitting all our airplanes just to fly over Europe would be an unwelcome financial burden. As things stood, the Europeans could use our system for free.

So while we were trying to understand the situation, the Europeans were sitting there looking fairly smug, especially one particular guy. I’m pretty sure our chairs were a little lower than theirs, because I remember looking up at them. Considering my torso length, I should not have been looking up. And then I got livid.