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Do You Ever Get the Feeling? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-18

By David Glenn Cox

Space travel is a risky business, and no one should ever doubt it. Failures are going to happen, accept them with grace. Space-X had another spectacular stunning awe-inspiring launch. Rated a complete success, even as the Starship fell in a million pieces creating a spectacular light show across the afternoon Caribbean sky.

So, I’m watching the launch, and the countdown clock was three seconds off. Was I watching an alternate feed or tape delay? Off by three seconds in a launch countdown is like being an hour late for work. But in the background was a building filled with hourly employees, and yahoo’s cheering manically. Like the crowd at “Let’s Make a Deal!” Pick me! Pick me! Yeah! Cheer! Oooh! Aaaaah! Yeah!

I watched men leave for the moon without such displays of artificial enthusiasm. But for some reason Space-X revels in self-flagellation with a company motto: “Look at Me! Look at Me! Ain’t, we special?” Space-X is sending two landers to the Moon! Ain’t that special! Wow! Go Space-X! Except Space-X ain’t sending anything to anywhere, except to orbit. Space-X will put a package into orbit, period. The lunar landers belong to NASA and Japan. Space-X is the Greyhound Bus Company carrying you to Grandma’s house. They didn’t discover Grandma or invent the bus; they just operate the bus line.

But watching the Space-X feed they focused specifically on the booster’ s return. (A fantastic technology.) Failing to mention the orbiter’s rapid unplanned disassembly. I didn’t know what the orbiter was supposed to do, and Space-X just cut away from the feed. I don’t fault them for their failures, I just don’t like all the propaganda and spin. I didn’t find out the orbiter broke up until later and from someone else.

No matter what happens at Space-X the crowd will always cheer and glom onto other’s accomplishments. Because Space-X is always successful even when the rocket breaks up into a million pieces. “We learned a lot! It won’t deter our future plans.” This is the Soviet method of space flight research. Keep launching until the rockets stop blowing up. Versus the NASA method of test, test, test and retest. It’s way more expensive to do it that way. But the results speak for themselves.

All Aboard Starship! We’s all going to Mars! And we’re going to have apartment buildings and shopping centers and used car dealerships with movie theaters and roller rinks. We’ll drink Coca Colas through a straw and shit in a vacuum toilet. The future sure looks wonderful.

Elon’s got it all figured out. Robots and just plain Joe’s will rework the Martian surface. We can live in caves and look out the window watching the robots doing all the work. I have yet to figure out why all the humans are there at all. Elon is going to terraform a planet without a breathable atmosphere or protection from the sun’s deadly radiation. Well sure, there are still a few minor details left to nail down yet.

Elon wants to make us a spacefaring people. And the more you begin to look at it the more it begins looking like a Florida Real Estate deal. And we’re going to have an Olympic size swimming pool and a big clubhouse with tennis courts! Doctor Swift’s midnight moonlight magic miracle potion guaranteed to be good for what ails you! Why are we going to Mars again? To learn and expand mankind’s knowledge? This is going to be somehow affordable?

The Concorde supersonic airliner never made a nickel, but Elon assures us space travel will be cost effective in the future. Do you ever get the feeling someone’s greening you? Now the launch I witnessed was simply an orbital mission. The trip to Mars requires SIX launches for fuel plus ONE for the trip to Mars. A launch currently costs around $100 million but it is hoped to reduce the cost down to two to ten million dollars. So, for say just $70 million dollars you can take an affordable one-way trip to Mars. Your ticket shouldn’t be more than say four or five hundred thousand dollars. (Sorry, No carry ons) But that’s only one way! You wanna come back sometime, don’t you? What are you doing first when you get to Mars? You can look out the window or watch television. Or look out the window. Play name that robot or decorate your cave. Maybe I’ll take up Martian baseball and play second base for the Elonville Mud hens.

Henry Ford spent two billion dollars trying to train rubber plants to grow on command in South America. The rubber plants won the day as a scientist developed synthetic rubber and Ford looked like a fool. One of these days very shortly, I suspect, science will discover another planet just like Earth. And all the Earth Martians will all look very foolish in their space suits.

This is the tower of Babel, the Sun King’s pipe dream. The vanity project extraordinaire. I don’t question the technology as much as I question the purpose. A goal without a mission, a game without a purpose. Until you find a bonifide reason to go to Mars and stay there. You’re just jerking your gherkin. Getting these people all excited and selling stock for nothing.

It takes acres of land to grow enough food. But they will do it hydroponically on Mars in caves and it shouldn’t take more than a couple hundred caves to feed a modest population. A couple of hundred flights carrying all the hydroponic equipment and boring machines. So, the farm will only cost between seven to eight hundred billion dollars to set up. Oh lord, plus there are dozens of robots to load too. Big suckers, like bulldozers only needing to be launched into space at a tremendous expense.

When I was a kid, they had these magazines which said nuclear power would be so cheap someday, they wouldn’t even put a meter on it. I was promised atomic lawnmowers and flying cars too. We were all going to the moon! We would have moon-based colonies! With good wages and plenty of leisure time too! But that was fifty years ago and none of it ever happened.

Do you ever get the feeling someone is greening you?

“Money is, in some respects, like fire. It is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.”

― P. T. Barnum

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