The National Review is outraged that Barack HUSSEIN Obama is cutting government spending in the middle of a recession:
Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration plans to scrap funding for voyages to the moon and to Mars, shows how low President Obama’s horizons truly are. [...]
Furthermore, at a time when the president claims his focus is on jobs, scrapping these programs — on which we’ve already spent nearly $10 billion — would cut public spending in one area that actually creates jobs.
Yeah.
You know those great pictures of Earth from outer space, showing our planet suspended against the blackness, a beautiful blue ball? No one has seen that view since the Apollo program ended 38 years ago. No astronaut has seen that view since then. We’ve all just seen the pictures.
Now, unless Congress rejects the president’s recommendations, the next people to see that view will likely be the Chinese.
I’m glad to see that the conservative intelligentsia are so serious about getting the deficit under control that they might almost consider not spending billions of dollars a year in order to prevent the Chinese from getting to the Moon first second in the top five seventh, except a Democrat proposed it. Such serious, serious people. Such a contribution to our democracy.
January 29, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Never mind letting the Chinese beat us to a lunar redux (not to be confused with a bloody pulp or an Abu Ghraib). Worse is that we won’t spend at least a few tens of millions of dollars giving some few astronauts the chance to personally see our planet suspended against the blackness, a beautiful blue ball! In HD!
Never mind that Hubble has, in its working tenure, shown us the cosmos in a dozen or so orders of magnitude more detail, variety, and reach.
Typical anti-animal rights conservatives. What about letting more chimpanzees see the inside of a prototype space capsule after being hurled into space and experiencing the nausea-inducing wonders of free fall!
I rarely am impressed by right wing lunacy (ha!) anymore, but this renewed by marveling contempt for their capacity to be dumb and deranged at once.
January 29, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Here:
Space AND economic stimulus
January 29, 2010 at 10:09 pm
And then there’s the still deadly Japanese hi-tech development threat:
January 29, 2010 at 10:22 pm
What if they just made up a crazy fake planet and agitated that we should go to that too. Like something from the Bible. Then they could get Obama for not being Christian and sending a delegation to crazyworld. Easterbook could write something about it.
January 29, 2010 at 11:11 pm
“No one has seen Crazyworld since 38 years ago when Nixon was reelected. We’ve all just seen the pictures.”
January 30, 2010 at 7:49 am
I knew, of course, that Gil Scott Heron was rebutting the National Review 39 years in advance, but I forgot he was doing it with an argument about health care reform:
January 30, 2010 at 10:12 am
Wait a minute, I thought Mr. Show blew up the Moon, like, 20 years ago! WTF?!
[sorry, dunno how to embed]
January 30, 2010 at 11:35 am
You know, I’m getting a sneaking feeling that the GOP doesn’t really care about fiscal discipline, and that if the GOP ever took the White House, the Senate and the House at the same time, that they wouldn’t balance the budget. This might sound crazy to some, but my theory – and it’s just a theory -is that they might even run sizable deficits.
It’s a shame we have no historical precedent with which to test my theory.
January 30, 2010 at 11:36 am
Also, man do I miss Chapelle.
January 30, 2010 at 11:44 am
Agreed
January 30, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Real progressive economists like Atrios and Krugman have said all along the stimulus needed to be bigger, not smaller, and that the deficit is a bugbear and really, if we didn;t have foreclosures unrenegotiated and if we didn’t have 10+% unemp[loyment, there’d basically be no deficit worries out to the furthest horizon of mortal timekeeping. Yes it is proof that the conservodips don’t really care about deficits, but long term growth can be goosed by far worse ways than paying for high tech engineering and science. And supertrains.
Just sayin’.
January 30, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Probably. But it can also be goosed in better ways than in making highly-trained engineers and scientists work for most of a decade on a project that everyone with a brain knew full well would never, ever, ever be realized. Spending tons of money on educating smart, capable people in practical, useful skills so you can then spend tons of money paying them to dig holes and fill them back up again is *arguably* better than burning tons of money in a big bonfire – I’ll let economists weigh in on that. But this isn’t like spending money on basic science, or on highways, or even just handing it out to poor people. It’s a waste on so many levels.
January 30, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Woe unto me, o Babylon, for I ride the fence on this one and shall surely have a high-speed rail rammed up my ass. That is to say that no moderation should go unpunished by exuberant extremism, if only because we all like a little excitement. I will now commence squealing like a majorly over-the-top pig:
I think that we should fund R&D into blatantly and vitally needed things like adequate clean alternative energy and related technologies that utilize that energy far more efficiently than those of today, but I also think that serendipity is a very powerful drug, and that to ally it with silly exaltations like Putting a Man (or Woman or a Chimpanzee, male or female, in a Man suit or a Woman suit) on Mars also creates gobs of beneficial if tangential technology & techno-jobs fallout.
The supreme ignorance of the Nat. Rev. article, to me, isn’t the apparent idiocy it proudly displays, but the hidden idiocy.
a) Why put a man on the moon *again* without at least some stated purpose more than just Do It Again before China does it first! (Which is like fucking the wife one last time before she leaves you forever for some Asian guy she’s never met.)
b) If we are to put people on other orbs, let us work to do it in a manner that might actually ‘usher in a new era’ (I love that phrase, don’t you? usher in a new era of furry sex, for example) of space exploitation via concepts like a space elevator (don’t tell me that ‘unobtainium’ doesn’t exist) and other far more efficient means of lifting stuff from the bottom of the gravity well than farting our way into orbit.
The Nat Rev article boils down to: ‘We proved we’ve got the biggest longest dick once, so we must now prove again that we still have the Great (and Whitest) Whale of all so folks won’t think it shriveled or retracted or got bit off by terrorists’.
(TheEds, this would, I think, provide an excellent starting premise for a new KK, animated or merely spirited. Why have an early 60s B&W cinema analog of Curtis LeMay ride a nuke bareback down from on high to the surface of our planet when he could ride one on a Rocket to the Moon and show everyone that we can not only extend it to La Luna but also make Her come?)
But I do agree we need more astronauts wearing eyepatches:
January 30, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Helluva metaphor for the recent banking meltdown, eh?
January 30, 2010 at 1:17 pm
If Obama started speakin in good ole boy gaffe, and privatized nukular missles by giving them to billionaires, and legally changed his name to George Dubya Bush The Second, the GOP would still find stuff. That’s what we’re good at. He shoulda outsourced space exploration to China while keeping an American corporate command center in Florida. Or the Caymans.
January 30, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Wait, wait. There were people who took GWB’s “MARS, BITCHES!” plan seriously? For even a second? Weird.
I’m as much of a whore for rocketships and space stations as the next nerd, and I do tend to think that in the really long term (like, in the next ten thousand years or so) it would be nice for homo sapiens to have some presence in a different gravity well just for diversification’s sake, but meanwhile back here on planet earth the cheapest, most reliable and most efficient way of lifting crap into orbit is still 40-year-old soviet lifters and capsules, and no amount of magic engineering is likely to change that any time in the near future.
January 30, 2010 at 10:12 pm
To deformity… and beyond!
CHina Leads World in Alt Energy Manufacturing
January 30, 2010 at 10:19 pm
“There were people who took GWB’s “MARS, BITCHES!” plan seriously? ”
I surely hope you don’t mean me. I remember when we were going to Mars after the Moon. Back in the ancient 60s when everyone who was anyone had a flying car. (Rusty dead beater in the backyard for taking acid trips around the galaxy.)
And cheap Soviet boosters still use an enormous amount of energy and material to lift a modest bit of freight into orbit. Fine for satellites but little else.
Anyway, Mars was just an example of a rather pointless target in space to aim public imagination and tax R&D $$. Personally, I miss the days when we imagined Mars had canals and Martian ruins, and Venus was a giant swamp with dinosaurs and shit.
You damn kids get off my launchpad!
January 31, 2010 at 9:19 am
A perspective from around another corner: we as groups, committees, what have you, are not so good at achieving our aims. Soviet 5-year plans come to mind, although I suppose their vaunted incompetence is partly exaggeration.
Point being that side effects often overwhelm intended results. Andrew Carnegie didn;t give a shit about steel or railroads, he wanted $$$$$$. Abe Lincoln cared more about the Union than Negro freedom. We didn’t care about lunar prospects nearly so much as not letting the Soviets claim Luna as theirs.
A massive push to design a working space elevator (with or without cheesy music) provides a target so distant but promising that it would very likely produce massively beneficial techno side effects. After all, every other fool has known since the late 70s that we need to massively develop alternate energy on a massive scale.
But that conflicted with Big Oil agenda, and nothing happened. We thrive, progressively, on foolhardy (terrific expression, ‘foolhardy’) crusades that coincidentally fund gobs of research the technofallout of which produce things that we find we can really benefit from. Like fuel cells sufficiently advanced to be useful on a household/automobile level:
“In recent years the interest in bringing this environmentally friendly technology to market has become intense. But there are problems: You can’t “fill ‘er up” with hydrogen at most corner gas stations. And fuel cell-based cars and computers are still relatively expensive. These obstacles have relegated fuel cells to a small number of demo vehicles and some specialty uses, such as power aboard the space shuttle and back-up power for hospitals and airports.
Now NASA-sponsored research is helping to tackle some of these obstacles. By finding a way to build “solid oxide” fuel cells that operate at half the temperature of current designs–500°C instead of a blistering 1,000°C–researchers at the Texas Center for Superconductivity and Advanced Materials (TcSAM) at the University of Houston hope to make this kind of fuel cell both cheaper to manufacture and easier to fuel.
“Less is more
“Our key advance was making the heart of the fuel cell–the sheet of electrolyte that controls the flow of electrically charged ions–out of a thin film only one micron thick,” says Alex Ignatiev, the director of the NASA-funded TcSAM.”
Seems that, unless we have, like, two major industrial nightmare fascist totalitarian empires working to trash the world in their image (WWII), we have difficulty focusing productively on the genuinely big issues. Lookit the cat-spitting contest surrounding AGW, for example (and the consistent inability of people to see that developing quality Alt. Energy simultaneously solves the carbon emission problem AND develops the economy).
So: while I’m very much in favor a major Energy Race program to resolve our fossil fuel aqddiction, my understanding of human nature is that this is far too practical an aim for us to sustain, particularly with vested corporate interests wanting to still squeeze oil profits first and provide answers last.
That said, neither Mars Baby! nor the far-sighted grandeur of a Space Elevator have what it takes to entrance the American people to get on board. We dug the Space Race because those lousy Russians got a satellite in space first and because rockets to the moon and missiles nuking Moscow purposively aligned in the popular mind.
I reckon it will take a killer winter combined with gas/energy prices double/triple of what they are now for us to get serious about producing alt energy. Of course, much of the needed tech is already at hand, needing only economy of production scale to adequately distribute it.
But think of the rocking turbine designs that would result, tangentially, from a push to devise the unobtainium needed to turn a space elevator from a Gernsback pulp cover into a resolvable engineering problem?
Looking back on it, the challenges of making enough high-quality steel to create a national network of railroads seem minor. Bur before the Bessemer process, it was a slow go, practically a rail dream.
January 31, 2010 at 1:46 am
“the cheapest, most reliable and most efficient way of lifting crap into orbit is still 40-year-old soviet lifters and capsules, and no amount of magic engineering is likely to change that any time in the near future…”
So, so true.
As bogeymen go, the Chinese space program is seriously weak tea. They’ve sent ships up there three times in the last five years. They haven’t launched in fifteen months, and we’re not sure they’ll do so in the next twelve. Their big, long-term, end-of-the-line desire is…a space station. First a dinky little space station and then one they can run continuously. Which puts them, in terms of ambition and scale, right about…let’s say, to be generous, the mid-1980s Soviet Union. And then they’re just going to keep spinning ’round, up there. Just like us.
China aren’t going to the moon for a long, long time. Unfortunately, neither are we.
January 31, 2010 at 9:08 am
They are just sad that they won’t get to cry lusty man tears over the self sacrificing astronauts who would have to spend so much time actually getting to mars (but don’t mention the deadly radiation exposure that comes with such a long trip – bad for bizness). They love getting all mushy inside over self sacrifice, just as long as they don’t have to do the actual sacrificin’.
January 31, 2010 at 2:48 pm
The moon. For several years, she has fascinated many. But will man ever walk on her fertile surface? Democratic hopeful Adlai Stevenson says so.
February 1, 2010 at 10:49 am
Every one knows the moon is a he and the sun is a she. Sheeesh!
January 31, 2010 at 4:39 pm
“fertile surface”?
Waiter! More Cavorite!