Thanks, folks, and don't forget to tip your bartender. He makes the jokes go down easier.
I applaud NASA for carrying out such interesting missions before a largely uncaring public. It's been a long time since Project Mercury made national celebrities out of a passel of test pilots and a bunch of nerds. Days like those may never come again.
And it's funny, because with the rise of the Internet and its attendant billionaires, nerds are being celebrated as never before. Commercial space flight becomes more possible all the time, making the final frontier open to not just plane jockeys and geniuses, but to the average slob (who happens to be stinking rich). At the box office, science fiction rules, or at least science fiction that involves fistfights and explosions (rare exceptions being films like Gravity, and it still had explosions). You'd think that we'd be hanging on everything NASA does.
Nah, it's always, "When are we going back to the moon? When can we send a human being to Mars? What have you been doing in the seven years since you put the space shuttle orbiters up on blocks, anyhow?"
Well, the public is dumb in a lot of ways, and always fickle. But there's also geopolitics to consider, and NASA's own part in this situation.
Back in the Mercury days, we were getting our astro-asses handed to us by the Soviet Union. First thing in space, first thing in orbit around the sun, first living thing in space, first man in space, first woman in space, first space walk -- those bastards were making us look stupid. We don't have that kind of pressure today. China may plant their godless flag on Mars before we get there, but it won't catch us off guard. It's not the same. Plus, as much as we're always trying to keep the Chinese in check (and vice versa), they are our capitalist trading pals now; we're not in a Cold War with them. Economic peewee Russia keeps grabbing the headlines because of their direct belligerence; the Chinese are playing a longer game. So the facts on the ground have a lot to do with the facts in the air, as it were. Because of this, NASA is not a key propaganda tool as it once was. It's a little hard to be chest-puffing about our space program when we have to beg rides from the Russians to get to our space station because we can't get anyone in orbit.
Even back in the halcyon days when America loved her astronauts, the support for the space program was not universal; as Tom Lehrer said it would be "twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon". And there is something about the boffins at NASA that makes me think that our concerns are not their concerns. What's important to scientists is to find out what's out there, not necessarily to be there to look at it. They seem to think humans are a waste on space missions. After all, it was our first satellite, Explorer 1, that discovered the Van Allen belts, not Alan Shepard or John Glenn. The Project Mercury astronauts were little more than passengers, "meat in a seat." I'm sure that NASA has gotten wonderful information from the space shuttle program and the ISS, but that doesn't trickle down to us, the people who have to pay for it. We are psyched by the guy who climbs Everest; the eggheads would just as soon send a drone up to look at it.
And maybe it's just as well. If we ever get this Mars mission going for real, Millennials will be running most of the operations, and that's alarming. They will insist that the first person to walk on Mars be a differently-abled tattooed aboriginal non-citizen multiracial minority transgender atheist lesbian poet who will plant the UN flag. Focused on checking all the PC boxes, not the competence of the mission members.
When priorities are disordered, disaster follows. In space, get woke, go dead.
I hope I don't live long enough to see the politically correct Mars launch. Even if we made it I would feel like there should be Martians there, just so they would laugh at us.
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