"The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is planning ahead — way ahead. The agency wants you to email ideas for how "the Administration, the private sector, philanthropists, the research community and storytellers" can develop "massless" space exploration and a robust civilization beyond Earth."
This is beautiful.
"We are running out of adventures [...] the mountains have all been climbed, the continents explored, and the romance of sailing away on a tall ship to undiscovered islands is no more. What will fire the imaginations of the next generation?"
http://io9.com/white-house-seeks-advice-on-bootstrapping-a-solar-syst-1647619795
"massless"? Is that a funny way of saying "not actually going anywhere"?
Is that a funny way of saying "haw haw politicians hur hur"?
A glance at the link shows that "massless" here means using mass that's already out there, instead of hauling everything up from the Earth's gravity well. Digging a little further, the term appears to have been coined by Mason Peck of Cornell University and formerly Chief Technologist at NASA.