Welcome to 2021: A space idiocy
On the 52nd anniversary of the first moon landing, the dichotomy between the rational and irrational in American life has never been greater.
Even our unrelenting mastery of technology feels curiously small-ball compared to the spirit of exploration that animated the space race more than two generations ago.
In those days there was an overwhelming consensus that science, logic and an optimistic vision of the future — even one “shaped” by the American democratic model as flawed as it was in practice — was a good thing.
Cold War anxieties about being outpaced by the Soviet Union fueled America’s leap into space far faster than our loftiest rhetoric about the New Frontier could ever have done on its own.
NASA’s space program had plenty of critics who complained that the billions diverted from the economy for bragging rights about getting to the moon first meant condemning millions of our most vulnerable citizens to languish in poverty that could’ve been eliminated by a Marshall Plan-like investment in the nation’s inner cities and rural areas.
On the fringes of the economic argument against the American space program were the usual collection of flat-Earthers, right-wing paranoiacs and get-this-fluorideout-of-our-water crusaders who always seem to emerge from fever swamps at times of great social tumult and technological change.
The launch of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard rocket a week after Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket plane made him the first plutocrat in space has shifted the old dynamic from one of Cold War rivalry to one that feels as banal as a couple of aging billionaires checking boxes off their cosmic bucket lists in an age of ever-accelerating technological accomplishment.
What was missing from Mr. Bezos’ launch to a 66-mile threshold above Earth — 13 miles beyond Mr. Branson’s threshold last week for those keeping tabs of their ridiculous phallic one-upmanship — is any sense that what they’re doing is in any way related to the collective welfare of mankind in general or this nation in particular.
If anything, these high-altitude trips that are affordable only by the planet’s most privileged feel like test runs for a future escape from inevitable environmental collapse or thermo-nuclear showdowns if climate change doesn’t get us first.
That’s why it’s hard for ordinary Americans to get excited about the success of Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin or SpaceX. The very folks who are “winning” now by killing the planet and strip mining its most precious resources for profit are the same people who are daydreaming about colonizing another planet and repeating the doomed cycle of cosmic capitalism. They will be exploiting the next planetary “utopia” as a matter of first principles because that is how they’ve always operated.
Elon Musk, the third billionaire plutocrat with designs on space, has already integrated his successful SpaceX Starship program with NASA’s plans to haul astronauts and heavy payloads to the International Space Station, the moon and beyond.
Mr. Musk is methodically laying the foundation for a manned trip to Mars within five years to begin settling and privatizing that planet. If he has his way, there will be an Elon City populated by hundreds of thousands on the red planet by the end of the century.
We can also expect dozens of corporations playing catch-up to create space-based mining operations to exploit the trillions to be made in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Space tourism will never be as profitable as doing to the asteroid belt what coal companies did to Appalachia over the decades.
If these grand schemes to commercialize humanity’s future in space sound vaguely familiar, think of the shadowy corporation that diverted the crew of the Nostromo to a moon full of eggs of unknown origin in “Alien” on the theory that hauling evidence of extraterrestrial life and technology, no matter how potentially dangerous, back to Earth was the quickest way to maximize profits.
The DNA of amoral, purely market-driven space operations is already in these early flights that make no pretense they are being staged for the advancement of humanity.
These hourslong trips into space are the folly of billionaires with the financial means to extend their midlife crises into the final frontier. The fact that they all sound like colonialists when asked why they don’t use their collective wealth on behalf of mankind gives away the game.
If they were to dedicate the fraction of their wealth currently directed to space to the abolishment of urban and rural poverty by the creation of first-rate schools and social service providers, they could advance America’s technological and moral advancement exponentially.
Yes, I know this sounds like an update of Gil Scott-Heron’s classic 1970 proto-rap “Whitey on the Moon,” but it has the luxury of actually being true. Mr. Bezos by himself could build the best schools in America and place them where they’re needed most just from his pocket change. That would be far more inspiring than blasting off into low-Earth orbit just because he can. His ego — and the egos of his rivals — is the mission. Nothing else. Yawn!
I keep thinking about a story I heard a few decades ago that may turn out to be apocryphal or a fantasy at best. Allegedly, American fighter pilots who were being held in prisoner-of-war camps after being shot down during the Vietnam War were congratulated by their Vietnamese captors on July 20, 1969, for Neil Armstrong’s declaration from the moon that he was making that first walk into the future on behalf of all “mankind.”
After being given extra rations by their captors to mark the occasion, the torture and beatings of the pilots resumed the next morning. Still, for one glorious day, all of humanity was united in awe as Armstrong skipped lightly across the dusty lunar surface, fulfilling a collective dream that had haunted our species from the beginning.
I’d like to think that this story is true, but it probably isn’t given the depravity and sheer anti-intellectualism on display in recent weeks in America and across the planet.
Right now, a former president who wants credit for fast tracking a COVID-19 vaccine refuses to encourage his most maniacal followers to get vaccinated. Right-wing media has convinced the majority of Republicans and conservatives that the vaccine isn’t necessary and that it is a Trojan horse for the confiscation of Bibles and guns from patriotic Americans.
Millions of Americans, perhaps more than half the country, have avoided being vaccinated against a variant of COVID-19 that will kill them or severely debilitate them if they contract it. More than 99.9% of those who have contracted the delta variant are unvaccinated.
Yet, the misinformation that the vaccines contain microchips that will further the government’s attempt at mass social control continues. Fox News, the official network of the anti-intellectual resistance to the Biden administration, encourages its most unsophisticated viewers to avoid being vaccinated even though it will kill them disproportionately.
Earlier plagues, including the Black Plague that devastated most of Europe and large swaths of the world in the Middle Ages, was initially blamed on Jews, Gypsies and other “social undesirables.” While bathing daily was discouraged as “sinful” and indulgent five centuries ago, no one thought anything of the pools of human feces that filled the streets, the flea-bearing vermin in their homes or the lack of sanitation in general. Those things were “natural” — bathing was not.
Today, masks and mass vaccination are considered suspicious by people who are now on ventilators or in danger of dying because of their own stubbornness and oppositionaldefiance to all authority. Many resist being vaccinated because getting stuck with a needle “isn’t natural.” Let nature cull the herd as some conservative broadcasters are now inclined to say out loud. The contempt they display for their own followers and customers is amazing.
We’re living in a time when Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci have replaced medieval Jewry in the demonology of Americans who prefer the “freedom” of the grave to the “slavery” of mass vaccination. These people, who know better, are proving themselves to be stupider than the victims of the Black Plague who navigated those dark times with mostly bad information through recurring bouts of that plague.
A half-century after Armstrong took a leap into the future on behalf of “mankind,” space is on its way to being privatized. Meanwhile, the children of the people who sent him to the moon are tired of pretending that there is any higher obligation to being an American than being as stupid and selfish as humanly possible, even if it means death by slow and agonizing suffocation. They prefer to build a rocket that points straight down than to face the future in which vaccines trump politically convenient superstitions.