First Flight

The space age began forty-seven years ago today when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Later today SpaceShipOne will lift off from a California desert airstrip in an attempt to claim the Ansari X Prize for the first private vehicle to reach space twice in two weeks.
I was born six days after Sputnik was launched. As a child of the space age, I should be excited by the flight of SpaceShipOne, and I suppose I am. But that excitement is tinged with nostalgia for the future we were supposed to have, and for the glory days of NASA (a nostalgia captured brilliantly by Jerry Oltion in his Nebula Award-winning novella Abandon In Place).
It’s hard to get worked up over a suborbital flight, thirty-five years after human beings first walked on the moon. I know, I’m supposed to be excited by the entrepreneurial glory of it all: I’d just as soon ride down to JFK and watch a bunch of JetBlue Airbus A320s take off. The problem with SpaceShipOne and its commercial successors is that they’re neither fish nor fowl; neither true exploration nor functional transportation. These private spacecraft aren’t going anywhere humans haven’t been before, and for them to be useful as transportation, they have to be going to someplace; for the foreseeable future, the destination for all private space launches is Right Back Where You Started. Imagine Magellan giving day tours of the Mediterranean. Don’t get me wrong: I think Burt Rutan is a genius, and I have nothing but admiration for the test pilots flying SpaceShipOne: I hope the team succeeds, and that the ship and pilot return safely to Earth, and I’m tickled that the FAA has issued its first set of astronaut’s wings to a civilian. But at best, private spaceships will provide cheaper access to space for commercial satellites and expensive sightseeing trips for tourists: worthwhile projects, I guess, but nobody’s going to be throwing ticker tape parades because of them.
Since the destruction of the Columbia space shuttle, there’s been a hue and cry over NASA’s “moribund” Human Spaceflight Program. Some of the criticism is justified, but some of it is the same old cant from Luddites who’d rather see the NASA budget scrapped for tax cuts to millionaires. This summer NASA landed two rovers on the surface of Mars, a body 50,000,000 kilometers away from Earth at its closest approach (if you flew an Airbus A320 to Mars you would arrive at Shunn International Spaceport in just under seven years—and that’s close by astronomical standards). Even though the Mars missions have no human crewmembers aboard, they are a technological feat beyond the ability of even the richest private enterprises: no corporation would sink approximately a billion dollars into research unlikely to pay off in the lifetime of the CEO, much less during an earnings quarter.
I don’t give a damn, frankly, about the first Virgin Atlantic Shuttle to Low Earth Orbit, nor am I thrilled by the prospect of the Exxon-Mobil Space Station. I’d like to see interstellar probes, blazoned with the NASA “meatball,” launched to our neighbors in the Milky Way Galaxy. I’d like to see a joint ESA-NASA crewed mission to Mars. I’d like to see the first expedition to an extrasolar planet blast off (no doubt from orbit), under an Earth flag. What makes my blood sing is not just exploration and science, but the romance of a shared endeavor. I’d like to look up at the night sky and imagine the emissaries of humankind falling through space toward a new star, rather than employees of Sumitomo Limited making another profitable run to the Kuiper Belt.
In 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the surface of another world. A billion people all over the Earth watched on television as Armstrong put the first human footprint in the ancient Lunar dust. That his words were scripted makes them no less powerful, nor less true: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

QRM – Interplanetary UPDATE

Would a Signal from Space Change our Religious Beliefs? has been changed to Sunday, October 10, 2004, on SETI Institute’s weekly radio program Are We Alone?

I’ll post a reminder late next week.

* QRM – Interplanetary is a science fiction story by George O. Smith, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942, and frequently anthologized, most recently in The Golden Years of Science Fiction (Second Series), 1983, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.

Making the Vietnam War Look Good

Retired Colonel Mike Turner discusses the Iraq war, in ‘Staying the Course’ Isn’t an Option, Newsweek online:

From a purely military standpoint, the war in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. This administration failed to make even a cursory effort at adequately defining the political end state they sought to achieve by removing Saddam Hussein, making it impossible to precisely define long-term military success…

To discern the truth about Iraq, Americans must simply look beyond the spin. This war is not some noble endeavor, some great struggle of good against evil as the Bush administration would have us believe. We in the military have heard these grand pronouncements many times before by men who have neither served nor sacrificed. This war is an exercise in colossal stupidity and hubris which has now cost more than 1,000 American military lives, which has empowered Al Qaeda beyond anything those butchers might have engineered on their own and which has diverted America’s attention and precious resources from the real threat at the worst possible time. And now, in a supreme act of truly breathtaking gall, this administration insists the only way to fix Iraq is to leave in power the very ones who created the nightmare.

Turner is a retired war planner who worked on Operation Desert Storm: in other words, a typical, bleeding-heart liberal, Air Force Academy graduate, career officer pansy. The full article is very much worth reading, even if the author is a pinko subversive fighter pilot.

The Hidden Casualties of Iraq

The Wounds of War in today’s Newsday is a must-read:

Like his staff, who brim with frustration at what they see as the irresponsible disinclination of the American people to understand the costs of the war to thousands of American soldiers, the hospital’s chief surgeon feels that most Americans have their minds on other things.

“It is my impression that they’re not thinking about it a whole lot at all,” said Lt. Col. Ronald Place. As he spoke, the man who has probably seen more of America’s war wounded than anyone since the Vietnam War sobbed as he sat at a table in his office.

I Am An Idiot

Zoot inadvertently deleted all the comments in this posting. She’s sorry for trashing everyone’s remarks—it was entirely by accident, she says. Feel free to file your complaints with , who cleverly managed to preserve her own posting while deleting mine.

Morning (Un)Constitutional


If you ever doubted that the Republican leadership is as cynically manipulative as Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Ministry of Propaganda, today’s New York Times story, House Passes Court Limits on Pledge, should convince you:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 – The Republican-led House of Representatives approved a measure on Thursday that would bar federal courts from ruling on the text of the Pledge of Allegiance. Democratic critics called the bill unconstitutional and unnecessary.

By a vote of 247 to 173, the House adopted the measure, which its Republican authors said would prevent federal judges from striking the clause “under God” from the pledge as it is recited in classrooms, as well as at the opening of every Congressional day.

The cover story, that Democrats, atheists and lesbians are scheming to take god out of the Pledge of Allegiance, is catnip to the drooling mad right wing. It’s also camouflage for an attack on the constitutional separation of the three branches of government.

It’s 1933 all over again: under the cover of “protecting” Americans’ religious freedom, the Republicans are engaged in the great Synchronization, insuring that no branch of government can oppose their ideological agenda. This is not a battle over the single issue of keeping the words “under god” in the Pledge: it’s a battle for control of the system itself—a fight not just over a rule, but over who gets to make the rules.

Sixty years from now, people will look back at the Republican party and wonder how Americans allowed themselves to be led over a cliff by a band of ruthless ideologues. Citizens of other countries will shake their heads at a leader who wouldn’t be competent enough to hold down a job at Starbucks, but through family connections and an aptitude for viciousness, managed to fail his way to the top of the U.S. government. Americans born in the next decade will read history textbooks and marvel at an electorate that shut its eyes to the signs of moral corruption and naked lust for power in the Republican party; an electorate that supported politicians who turned the United States into a vast concentration camp under the cover of piety and patriotism.

Copyright © Robert J. Howe