How's This for a Pitch?

"Here's the plan! We get to the Moon, see? And then we make a handful of visits, right?"

"Yeah. And then what? We build bases? Research stations? Colonies, even?"

"No. Then we never come back. Not ever."

"And then we never come back. Not ever! That's the ticket! Yeh."

Robbed of Our Dreams.

When I was a kid I was fascinated by our space missions. I have to admit up front that I didn't start following our various space missions earnestly until the Gemini program. I was just a tad too young when the Mercury Project was going on. Or perhaps I was more interested in dinosaurs than in rockets. But when I was eight years old everything changed. The Gemini Project fascinated me and of course I had to get up to speed on the Mercury Program. My closest friends and I all knew the "Original Seven" astronauts. They--and the astronauts who followed them--were heroes to us.

Today I was sad to learn of the death of one of those astronauts who followed the original seven. John Young left us at the age of 87. He was obviously one hell of a good pilot because he was the only astronaut to command Gemini, an Apollo Command Module, a Lunar Excursion Module, and (our awful and excessively flawed and dangerous) Space Shuttle. That alone is an almost unbelievable achievement.

From my days in the third grade all the way through the various Moon missions and the followup Skylab missions I had no doubt at all that someday soon my country would have outposts on the Moon, vast wagon-wheel space stations in orbit around Earth and the Moon, and manned missions to Mars. The dresser in my room was awash in models of all kinds of rockets. My walls had posters of the lunar surface and of our spacecraft, and my bookshelves were full of biographies of our astronauts, simply physics books on rocketry, and pamphlets of various NASA missions.

I had no doubt whatsoever that someday I'd be able to take a vacation into space. Maybe not to the Moon, but at least to a space station in orbit. And if you'd asked me in those days, I'd have repeated the NASA propaganda that we would surely be sending a manned mission to land on Mars some time in the 1970s. Wernher von Braun had said so (even if he was a reformed Nazi, he was the leader of the US space program).

By the time the Skylab mission was winding down around 1974 I was in my teens and I realized that space was not for us. I knew that something had happened at the all of the stories of what we were going to accomplish in space was--if not hot air--then at least the destruction of our possible future as a space-faring nation. After that, if someone mentioned space exploration I would ignore them.

I've heard all of the many reasons why the USA largely abandoned the exploration of space and the colonization of gravitational Lagrangian points or the manned villages on the lunar surface. And, of course, we were not going to Mars. Not then. Not now. Not ever. When this nation gave up those dreams it gave up the ghost, I like to think. The bottom line is that you can't have corporations and the ultra-rich not paying taxes and things like manned space exploration, too. You can have one, or the other. And the US chose to eliminate taxes for those most able to pay them and to abandon our vigorous manned exploration of space and the planets.

But none of that detracts from the amazing accomplishments of John Young, perhaps the finest astronaut the space program of the USA ever had, or ever saw. So, here's to Capt. John Watts Young, USN. He was among the best the nation had.

John Watts Young. The only man to command a Gemini capsule, an Apollo Command capsule, a Lunar Excursion Module, and a Space Shuttle. I mean...damn.

Mars...a Bust!

I read a lot of science essays and articles. Among those are works on our various space programs. They almost all depress me.

Keep in mind that I am a child of the 60s. When I was a kid we were told we were going to send humans to the Moon and we did it. The information was everywhere and at hand, and the propaganda over it was like a flood of good news. I loved reading about it and I loved the experience of watching it happen. It probably never would have occurred if the USA had not needed at that time a great amount of good will propaganda, which the Apollo Moon program provided--in spades.

I also read widely as a kid on the plans of Werner Von Braun to send our American astronauts beyond the Moon and on to Mars. This was not only a dream of mine, but also of the brilliant rocket scientist from Germany. He had lobbied hard to lend a hand to the sputtering rocket program of the USA and the folk in charge had finally relented and put Von Braun and his German pals into positions of power and influence over our space exploration projects.

My parents had around the time I was nine or ten given me a copy of an old 1954 issue of Collier's Magazine (Hell--I could write volumes on Collier's and how its demise shocked everyone). The magazine had given a vast effort to showing how Von Braun had planned a manned mission to Mars. The guy felt he could do it and knew that the vast wealth of the USA could get it done. (I lost that magazine, but I really wish I still had it.)

So, Von Braun knew he could get us to the Moon for propaganda purposes against the Soviet Union. We needed that, because they had upstaged us in rocket development early on. The USA really had to beat them to the Moon, and of course we did--by pouring unlimited funds and resources into the project. Von Braun thought that he would be allowed to continue with his dreams and see us head off to Mars under his direction.

Alas, the government of the USA got what it wanted out of the Apollo program and let it wither and die. And then, with no more need of deep space human missions, they let that dream die, too. Von Braun and his team of scientists were quietly retired from NASA and since those days the great Administration has been allowed to die the death of a thousand budget cuts.

From time to time I'll see optimistic articles of how we are going to go to Mars. But it's not going to happen. Von Braun died without having seen it, and I'll die without seeing it, and everyone else will die without seeing it. Because, the bottom line is that private corporate concerns no longer pay taxes and missions like going to Mars demand the attention of National capital investments in both tax money, intelligence, and manpower. And since we are now utterly and completely under the thrall of the super-rich, I can guarantee you that we will never again achieve the goals of humans into deep space.

Fred Freeman's illustration of part of Von Braun's vision to get humans to Mars.

Once and For All: The Space Shuttle was a Piece of Shit.

Every once in a while I'll have a friend link me to an article about the old Space Shuttle. About what a great vehicle it was and how proud some city or another is to have part of the mothballed fleet in their community museum.

I get really sick of this. Because the Space Shuttle was a piece of shit. It was poorly designed and poorly utilized. It was a failure in so many ways as a space vehicle that it's hard to get your mind around how feeble it truly was.

It was supposed to have heralded the inception of the regularly scheduled reusable orbital spacecraft. In fact, though, it was a money-pit and dangerous for people who not only had to fly it, but who had to work around it. In all of the years it was used it never lived up to its hype and by the time it was discontinued it had the reputation of being a truly dangerous vehicle.

Some people have argued the point that it flew X-number of missions with only two failures and wasn't statistically as dangerous as I say it was. In fact, though, they're working from the wrong model. The fleet was five-strong. Of the five vehicles, two had catastrophic failures that resulted in the total destruction of the vehicles and the deaths of their entire crews. That means that 40% of the fleet ended up killing everyone who was aboard.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I was asked to use a vehicle that had a 40% failure rate that resulted in everyone on it being killed, I wouldn't even think about climbing aboard. What if 40% of every Ford Falcon had disintegrated, causing the death of everyone driving and riding in them. Would you honor such a vehicle or wish to use it? I might write a column about how shitty the concept was, but I'd be damned if I'd be proud of it.

So, to my pals who keep sending me links about the fucking Space Shuttle: cut it the fuck out.

It was a piece of shit and a lasting shame to our space program.

Whoop ti Do.

Well, I have to say that after a year on Mars, the Curiosity rover has proven the one thing that I hoped it would not prove:

Mars truly is a boring rock.

There is nothing really going on there. Not only is it now a cold, almost airless, immensely dry and lifeless ball of frigid stone, it has been that way for billions of years.

Yeah, yeah. It had flowing water and a thick atmosphere once upon a time. Yatta yatta yatta. But for billions of years it has been cold and airless and bereft of just about anything we could term as activity. There is no rain, no rivers or lakes, no vegetation. There is not even any tectonic activity, nor active volcanism.

Mars is just a dead, rusty period--a tiny dot of blood on a black velvet surface.

Apparently it was murdered by a vast collision with something about the size of Pluto about four billion goddamned years ago. Since then the atmosphere has been blasted into the ether. What little atmosphere it still has (almost none), is still leaking off into the solar wind and will be stripped completely away in time.

It's just a goddamned boring destination.

Alas, there are no tharks. There are no denizens dark and golden-eyed. No beings living in the dust with glass javelins.

Big Whoop.

Space Crap

A lot of my friends keep whining about the death of the Space Shuttle. As if it was some kind of wonderful, crowning glory of human space flight. In fact, though, it was a horrible project. It was one of the most dangerous vehicles ever pushed through to completion and into mission status. The damned things were flawed at a basic level and inexcusably dangerous to fly. Everyone knew that, and yet the project was rammed through. And what can you expect from a project that was initially chaired by Spiro T. Agnew? I'm amazed that they found teams of pilots and engineers to fly on the missions. Think about it: 40% of the vehicles failed in flight, killing all passengers aboard. Would YOU get into a vehicle if 40% of them failed, killing all aboard? No effing way!

The Space Shuttle: Good freaking riddance.

Columbia.

Nada for NASA

You know how all the sci-fi fans have fantasized for decades about going to the stars? Well, they can fucking forget it. It ain't gonna happen. No Star Trek for you!

"No space travel for you!"

And the reason is this:

Human space travel is just prohibitively expensive!

It costs millions of dollars merely to toss a human in a tin can into low Earth orbit. Okay, maybe Branson Airlines can get the price down to a few hundred thousand bucks for a sub-orbital flight. But that's not a mission to a distant star. It's not even a trip to the freaking moon, our nearest planetary neighbor.

We're not going back to the Moon, and we're not going to Mars, and we're not going to Jupiter and Saturn and the little mini-worlds those gas giants host.

We ain't goin'!

Von Braun had the plans to go to Mars in 1956!

Our former idiot President G.W. Moron Bush announced that we were going back to the Moon and that we were going to be preparing to visit Mars. But of course he didn't give NASA the money to do these things. No, he was too busy packing our nation's wealth into the pockets of his daddy's butt-buddies. Trillions to commit mass murder in Iraq, nada for NASA.

So over the years NASA did its best to develop a half-assed system for getting us back into delivering fairly large payloads into orbit and to the Moon. It was called the Ares/Constellation system. Basically, it was a slightly larger version of the old Apollo module/Service module/Lunar module concept. Visually, it sucked because it had a tired "been there, done that" look to it. But if it worked once it could certainly work again.

Even this half-assed design ain't goin' to happen.

However, nothing like that works if there's no money to buy it.

Enter the new political administration. At least they have been honest enough to admit that there's no money for NASA to return to the Moon. Our once-mighty space administration is now going to have to scrap the Ares project. The USA is hoping some private firm can get people into low Earth orbit. Or we can continue to hitch rides to the Space Station on Russia's tried and true Soyuz capsules. We've pissed trillions down a rat hole that leads directly into the bank accounts of a handful of powerful USA families. Want to know where the money went that was supposed to give us trips to the Moon and Mars; high speed rail travel from Seattle to Miami; universal health care; new National Parks; green energy? Look in the bank accounts of America's richest families.

They took it all.

We're fucked.

The only Shuttle NASA can afford.

In Honor of...

In honor of the moon landing and other shit.

This is what it would have been like if I'd been in Neil Armstrong's shoes that day. And my pals had been in Mission Control in Houston.

And then there's this, not for any other reason than that it's funny as hell.

I don't know who these cats are, but the BBC plays some interesting stuff.