James P. Pinkerton worked in the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Since leaving government in 1993, he has been a columnist for Newsday, a contributor to the Fox News Channel, and a regular on Fox’s Newswatch show. He has also been a member of the board of contributors to USA Today and a lecturer at the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University. Mr. Pinkerton is the author of What Comes Next: The End of Big Government and the New Paradigm Ahead (Hyperion, 1995), and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Fortune, The New Republic, National Review, and Slate, among other publications.

As a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Mr. Pinkerton studied what he described as “the single most remarkable phenomenon of our time: the collapse of faith in the future.” He was doing so by examining America’s waning interest in outer space and its exploration. Space may not be the final frontier for humanity, but in Mr. Pinkerton’s view it should be the next frontier, as John F. Kennedy said. Yet it is a frontier we have been shying away from for more than three decades, with the result that we have lost the opportunity to experience any number of political, economic, technological, environmental, and cultural breakthroughs.