Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
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James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
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Cartago Delenda Est

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Wednesday, September 21, 2005

10:57 - Blank Space Race
http://coldfury.com/index.php/?p=5777

(top)

It's way too easy to make fun of NASA's latest Grand Aspiration: to return to the moon for only half the inflation-adjusted cost as last time, by 2018. But Mike at Cold Fury does it anyway, since just because it's easy to mock doesn't mean it doesn't deserve it.

This is what it's come to, then? Issuing reassurances to the public that it won't cost us anything in blood or treasure to make sure that the long-ago-hard-won Moon won't become Chinese by default, out of our lack of interest?

On the question of cost, Mr. Griffin said space represented a long-term investment that should not be sidetracked by immediate concerns of tight budgets and crises like Hurricane Katrina.

�We�re talking about returning to the moon in 2018. There will be a lot more hurricanes and a lot more other natural disasters to befall the United States and the world in that time, I hope none worse than Katrina,� Mr. Griffin said at a news conference.

This is the Moon, guys. Remember, the Moon? And you're talking about Katrina? In twenty years Katrina will be a blip, like any other local disaster with a media-friendly name, like Loma Prieta or the Good Friday earthquake/tsunami, and as easily recovered from. I know Mr. Griffin is having to answer questions from a press corps trying to win perspicacity points by raking together disparate nettling counterarguments from all across the news spectrum, as they seem to have discovered that a great way to get noticed is to stump a politician with a question like "Wouldn't you say that Social Security reform is an irresponsible path to follow considering that there have been unusually rainy Octobers in seven out of the last nineteen years that Republicans have been in office?" �and I know NASA may not have had to prepare any answers weighing its own future against Katrina relief, so this might have come as a surprise. I don't know if the guy would have said anything differently if General Honore had had his back. But regardless, this all tells me simply that NASA doesn't know what it's for anymore.

As Steven Den Beste once said, it's a fallacy for someone to say, "Hey, if we can put a man on the moon, then we can damn sure come up with an alternative to fossil fuels," or some such. They're totally different kinds of engineering problems. Putting a man on the moon is something we accomplished with the technology of the 1960s. In brutal honesty, there's not all that much high technology involved in putting people into space. Space didn't require the development of new kinds of physics or the discovery of amazing new sources of energy. There's nothing all that revolutionary about filling up a big tank with liquid oxygen and lighting it on fire. Space is all about math. Lots and lots of math. Whereas the Moon Shot was akin to the invention of the car in the annals of human accomplishment, the development of an alternative fuel source would be more like the invention of the Star Trek transporter.

Space wasn't about conquering Nature or ushering in a new technocratic Future, though those were side effects. It was about something else, something a lot more fundamental and parochial. It was a WPA project in all but name, a way for Americans to unite behind a common purpose that would pay off in scientific dividends secondarily, but grand theater above all. It's What We Can Do if We All Pull Together.

The Moon Shot, as I understand it from the perspective of someone born years after Man last set foot there, was never a practical matter when you came right down to it. It was purely a point of national pride: We gotta get there first. Never mind that there's nothing actually there. It's the principle of the thing. And that sounds terribly cynical, written in today's language... but at the time, it didn't have to be. People actually got behind it. A matter of pure vanity got hearts genuinely pumping, even on the evening news. And yet today, we're so steeped in self-effacing irony and the reflexive recoil from anything that looks like "propaganda" that just to even show reruns of "The Omega Glory" risks losing advertisers. We're too smart for such parlor tricks today. In this atmosphere, the entire point of going to the Moon is wasted.

Sure, I'd like to see it happen. I just don't think anyone�in NASA or in the general public�really knows the visceral, binding power of the concept of going to the Moon in the first place, and now they're just going through the motions as befits our faded interest in that whole anachronistic long-ago Future.

UPDATE: On the other hand, maybe things aren't so grim. Check out this reader e-mail to Dean Esmay, following many similar threads of thought, and Dean's quite compelling response.

I do think we've sacrificed a lot with our mad rush into sophistication and malaise and irony in latter decades; but I can't deny that I'd just as soon live today as back then.