Americans want that money spent on Earth
Welcome to the latest, action-packed episode of Billionaires in Space. In case you missed the most recent action: Sir Richard Branson made it to the edge of space in his Virgin Galactic rocket plane. That put him ahead of fellow filthy rich pioneers Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bezos hit the skies Tuesday in his Blue Origin New Shepard rocket and space capsule. Musk, it seems, is playing a longer game. No mere space tourism for him. He wants to colonize Mars.
Some argue that such explorations represent the true spirit of adventure and enterprise. After all, Branson and Bezos didn’t just fly in their own vessels; they also paid for them. Others, however, are already singing a different tune, one that dates to the days following the original moon landing. If you don’t already know it, now is a good time to acquaint yourself with Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.”
The preeminent spoken word artist of the 1970s and ’80s, and a spiritual and stylistic forefather of hip-hop, Scott-Heron was known for his rhyming take-downs of American hypocrisy and inequality. His most famous song, 1971’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” drew a series of lines between commercialism and genuine social change (“The revolution will not go better with Coke / The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath / The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.”)
“Whitey on the Moon” arrived one year earlier, in February 1970, less than a year after the moon landing. Scott-Heron wasn’t the only one protesting the space race. In his 2003 paper “Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight,” Roger D. Launius writes: “Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space.”
This was also the age of the Kerner Commission, convened to examine the urban uprisings sweeping the country during the ’60s; and the Moynihan Report, a study of African American families. But Scott-Heron didn’t need such official accounts. He had a front-row seat to the nation’s racial and economic inequality. While the U.S. was spending some $28 billion (or $288 billion when adjusted for inflation) to reach the moon, poverty was running rampant back on Earth.
Or, as Scott-Heron put it over a pulsing bongo beat: “Was all that money I made last year (for Whitey on the moon) / How come there ain’t no money here (Hm! Whitey’s on the moon).”
In other parts of the song, Scott-Heron provides close-ups to go with the overview, how a “rat done bit my sister Nell” and “I can’t pay no doctor bill.” He then connects the macro view of the space race to the personal: “Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.” Here Scott-Heron conjures imagery right out of Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” with its vision of Chicago’s Black Belt, where rodents are tangible messengers of poverty. It should be noted that Scott-Heron was hardly the only Black person protesting Apollo 11. Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, called the moon landing “an inhuman priority.”
The song continues to echo through pop culture. In the 2018 movie “First Man,” a rather melancholy drama about Neil Armstrong, Fort Worth’s Leon Bridges appears briefly as Scott-Heron, performing “Whitey” against the backdrop of an anti-NASA protest. More recently, the since-canceled Black sci-fi drama “Lovecraft Country” used the song for both an episode title and musical accompaniment and commentary on a mystical brand of white power.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, global warming portends all manner of catastrophe, we can’t quite get COVID under control, race relations are plummeting and democracy is under attack. Branson and Bezos know this, even in their spaced-out state. Musk, in his quest to colonize Mars, seems all too ready to spend his money, cut his losses and leave all of these problems behind.
Sure, spaceflight has delivered plenty of benefits to humanity but it’s hard to reconcile that with vain tourism. To paraphrase Scott-Heron, there’s plenty wrong down here. Why so eager to fly away up there?