Bastardry #12

Wednesday February 11 2004, 9:13pm...

Micro-rant, this one's political. Consider yourself warned.

I'm as much a proponent of space exploration as any sci-fi geek. I watched the Apollo missions on live TV in kindergarten, I followed the evolution of the shuttle through its early exciting stages, and I look forward to the International Space Station. I've watched all the great sci-fi space films as well as the merely mediocre, even some truly bad ones (I even sat all the way through 'Galaxina' and 'Battle Beyond the Stars!') I may not be a Trekkie but I know the classic series well enough, I even like some episodes of the newer series. I adore 'Babylon 5,' and I even watched 'Space Rangers' for a few episodes. I agree that we ignore the possibilities space and other worlds offer at our peril, and even though I've watched shuttle launch after shuttle launch, I still get a thrill from it. I like space.

That being said, I am pissed off by George the Second's call for a manned mission to Mars. Why? The answer should be obvious to anybody who's followed his presidential tenure and has more than two brain cells to rub together. Bush doesn't believe in Mars. He doesn't believe in space. Bush believes in keeping Bush in the White House, and he will play any card that will increase his chances. By pointing the public's eyes at Mars, Bush hopes that voters will be so busy looking up they won't notice the mess they're walking through on their way to the polls, a mess largely of his and his buddies' making.

John Kennedy pulled a similar stunt with promising that the U.S. would be the first  to place men on the moon, but at least JFK was doing it to further American prestige, not his own. Kennedy would probably never have made a second term if the USSR had beaten the US to the Moon, but our success was just that: OUR success. Not Kennedy's, the success of Apollo belonged to America. If somehow NASA is able to fulfill Bush's wish to land us on Mars, Bush will do everything he can to link himself with their success, as if he'd contributed one bit of the engineering, scientific, and logistical know-how it would take. Even the money it will take won't come out of Bush's pockets.

Even if Bush's motives are just self-serving election-year sleight-of-hand, isn't it worth it to get us to Mars? To actually reach another planet? Isn't allowing this Texas bantam to strut and crow "Look what I did!" if we make it an acceptable price to pay in order to get there?

Not if getting there leaves him in charge.

And there's more to my anger at this than anti-Bush sentiment. In the Sixties we had no choice but to send men to the Moon, if we really wanted to know what it was like. Just as we had no choice but to strap men into untested hypervelocity monsters like the X-series, in order to find out what happens to men and machines at those speeds and those altitudes. Computers were barely a decade old at that time, still running on tape and punch cards. The PC or laptop you're reading this diatribe on has more power than the room-sized mainframes NASA used to engineer and manage the Apollo missions. And robotics in the Sixties was barely more advanced than that. There was no substitute for live missions if we wanted any meaningful data at all. And while remote sensors and robotic arms still place a poor second to actually being there, the current state of the art makes remote missions cheaper, safer, and nearly as productive as manned missions. Remember when some NASA mathematician's mistake resulted in a Mars probe burying itself in the Martian landscape instead of landing? Imagine if that had been a manned module. Instead of being out some millions of dollars in hardware, we'd have been poorer by lives.

I want us to go to space. I want to go to space myself. But I want our arrival on another planet to be the product of scientific curiosity, or even economic self-interest. And the arrival doesn't have to be America alone, in fact it'd be better if it were an international effort. If landing on another planet means advancing the careers of politicians who don't believe in space, don't believe in America, don't believe in anything but themselves, and who don't care what it costs in terms of money and lives to advance themselves through this hypocrisy, forget it. I'll stay on Earth.

An ironic note in conclusion: remember the message of 'The Day the Earth Stood Still?' It's OK if we want to screw up our own planet and blow each other up daily. But the moment we try to spread that idiocy beyond our own gravity well Gort and his buddies will slap us down hard. It'd almost be funny to have Bush's Mars mission succeed only to have something like that happen.