This week scientific visionary and interplanetary trailblazer George W. Bush announced a bold new initiative for American astronauts to return to the Moon by 2020 and thereafter to Mars and beyond. "We do not know where this journey will end, yet we know this: human beings are headed into the cosmos."
What Dubya forgot to mention during this press conference is that he intends to pay for his conquest of the Solar System not by pumping up NASA's paltry budget (he proposed that Congress only increase NASA's share of federal funding by a billion dollars that it's almost guaranteed not to get, given that the Administration is showing no signs of slowing its spending on the terrestrial war machine), but by gutting existing projects, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, which will no longer be serviced by the Space Shuttle fleet, or so a stunned scientific community learned yesterday. A wittier fellow than I pointed out that getting rid of the Hubble, which routinely takes pictures of objects that are millions if not billions of years old, probably plays well with Bush's fundamentalist Christian base, who think the universe was created back in 4004 B.C.!
Now don't get me wrong - unlike a lot of my left-leaning friends I am a space enthusiast. I don't see why we can't have social spending and money reserved for the exploration of the cosmos, especially if we divvy up that 400 billion-plus defense budget. And to the Robert Heinlein-style libertarians who tell me that the future of space is in privatization, I say yes, you're probably right, but not until a government such as our own takes the initial risk and paves the road to the stars, just as the Feds constructed the Interstate Highway System, the Internet, and today subsidizes the hell out of the biotech industry (yet allows individuals and companies to enjoy the patents and profits of said Federally-funded research). Say what you want about the entrepeneurial spirit, but capital is by its very nature risk-averse. If we want to go into space, organizations like NASA must boldly lead the way; the privateers will then follow.
It is precisely such courage, however, that Bush's "vision" lacks. When I used to imagine the future as a little kid, my head chock full of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke (not to mention Heinlein), it most certainly did not look like this. In the 21st Century we were already supposed to be back on the Moon, tramping about Mars, ice-fishing for life on the Jovian moons, and sending out an interstellar probe or two. So what happened? The Challenger catastrophe in 1986 was certainly a major factor, but it shouldn't have been enough to deter a people already familiar with the hazards of space flight through the trials and tribulations of the Apollo missions. No, I think the main culprit was a lack of interest on the part of the American public. For a nation that was conceived by intellectuals and made great by the perpetually curious, there's an astonishing indifference - and sometimes even out-and-out hostility - towards science and the liberal arts in America these days. But is that because we ourselves lack imagination nowadays, or that our leaders lack it? A great leader should be able to inspire and challenge his electorate; whereas Dubya has thus far ruled by fear and ignorance. No wonder no one wants to follow him into outer space!
But I will miss the Hubble and its beautiful pictures when it finally breaks down for good. Enjoy it while it lasts, folks!
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