To the Moon, Alice

As perhaps you may have heard, America's Fearless Leader, the Son King, may soon propose a glorious new scheme to send Americans to the Moon once again, as a warm-up to a manned Mars expedition. It is rather appropriate, given what a space cadet the miserable failure is.

Sources involved in the discussions said Bush and his advisers view the new plans for human space travel as a way to unify the country behind a gigantic common purpose at a time when relations between the parties are strained and polls show that Americans are closely divided on many issues.

"It's going back to being a uniter, not a divider," a presidential adviser said, echoing language from Bush's previous campaign, "and trying to rally people emotionally around a great national purpose."

It's also stupid. And I'd say the same thing if it were proposed by a President Dean, or a President Clark, or a President Nimoy rather than a President Bush.

Now, don't get me wrong. Unlike certain people, I have no objections to manned space flight in theory. I like the idea. I'm sufficiently interested in the hardware involved that, in my younger days, I nearly went into aerospace engineering. I consume a lot of science fiction. Space probes fill me with pleasure. My picture of the ideal future involves things like solar power satellites, asteroid mining, and permanent habitats at L5. Ideally speaking, I would be a total space freaknut.

That being said, it's still stupid.

This Gregg Easterbrook character, who is apparently famous, or reputable, or something, has already pointed out that such a venture would gobble up cash like a maddened thing that gobbles. And he isn't wrong. I guess Easterbrook isn't the gaseous universal prat I'd taken him for. Who knew?

Anyhow, as Easty notes, this project is also bad science. Any Lunar outpost liable to be approved would be a less floaty version of the International Space Station: hideously expensive, troublesome to maintain and support, scientifically sort of useless, and an unspeakable sinkhole sucking away wodges of cash from real science programmes. And basically a pork project to blow dollars up the arse of the aerospace industry, just as the ISS is partially there to keep Russian engineers building space hardware rather than, say, long-range ballistic missiles for naughty, naughty countries who mostly hate gays.

And why might George W. Bush endorse a Moon base or Mars mission? Either he's a science illiterate surrounded by advisors who are science illiterates, or it's a blank check for aerospace contractors.

I'm thinking a little from Column A, a little from Column B.

Sometimes NASA makes me so angry...Some day, manned spaceflight will be a wonderful, practical, useful thing, supplying our planet with clean, inexhaustable power, wacky new zero-gravity industrial products, new frontiers to orgasmify the human spirit, and somewhere to send people we don't especially like having around, like Lance Bass. But that day is not today. There is very little up there worth doing in the near future that machines can't do for us for a fraction of the cost, and without the risk of blowing people up and dumping their ashes somewhere horrid like Texas. There isn't a science payoff to sending people up. There isn't an industrial or real technological one, without some kind of unimaginably mega-huge attempt to build full-scale Lunar mines, orbital factories, and all manner of not-immediately-practical offworld infrastructure. People are fat and moist and gassy. Machines are slick and efficient, and don't need air, or magazines, or innovative zero-g toilets. Machines don't bitch about being sent on multi-year missions that force them to miss several seasons of Angel. They're just better.

As they stand, the Space Shuttle and the ISS just should not exist. Nor should this crackpot Moon scheme. All that money could be spent to much greater effect developing a reusable launch vehicle that doesn't suck. And sending more probes to Uranus.

I have a burning desire to probe Uranus.

I want to know more about its curious moon Miranda, goddammit.

This is nothing but a slime-encrusted ploy to exploit idealism for partisan political purposes ('uniter' my ass) and pork, and I for one am miffed. Miffed, I say!

Posted by aloysius at January 09, 2004 07:28 PM | TrackBack |