Tag: Moon

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national politics & policies progress voluntary cooperation

Dream & Achieve More, Not Less

Artemis, moon, space exploration, private enterprise, NASA

The successful Artemis II mission is one answer to what we have been told for way too long, that exploration “beyond known boundaries” is unaffordable and “too risky.”

“We are told not only to consume less but to dream less,” writes John Tillman. “Always the same chorus: lower your expectations. Stop reaching.” SpaceX and Artemis II have interrupted this tune.

And Artemis II has a lot to do with SpaceX, Tillman stresses. It’s NASA, it’s a government program, but one heavily reliant on markets.

NASA deserves credit for managing a complex mission. But 2,700 private companies were involved in providing crucial components.

Lockheed Martin. Made the Orion spacecraft that carried the crew.

Boeing. Made “the massive core stage of the Space Launch System rocket.”

Northrop Grumman. Made rocket boosters and an abort system.

Aerojet Rocketdyne. Made engines and thrusters.

“That’s just the prime contractors. Beneath them sat a supply chain of extraordinary depth.”

There’s more. In the five decades that NASA avoided lunar exploration and colonization, private enterprise had been providing reminder after reminder as to just how much could be accomplished by tapping dispersed knowledge and talents — from feeding the masses to connecting everyone via computer networking — making any lingering timidity or depressive preconception ultra-passé.

“SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches for $67 million, lands its boosters, and flies again within weeks. That’s a nearly twenty-five-fold cost reduction through competition and innovation. When companies bear the risk, they solve problems creatively. When taxpayers bear the risk, you get decades of stagnation.”

That’s how markets and dreams work — when they’re allowed to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly individual achievement media and media people

Bezos’s Big Breakaway

Jeff Bezos, moon, luna, conspiracy,

Something big may be about to happen. 

Trump impeachment? Financial collapse? War with Iran? — each is all-too-likely, none desirable. But I am referring to space.

In The Economist, May 14th, we read of Jeff Bezos’s itch to live off-planet. 

The article is “Amazon’s boss reckons that humanity needs an HQ2,” which tells us that on “May 9th the founder and boss of Amazon, who also runs Blue Origin, a private rocketry firm, unveiled plans for a lunar lander. ‘Blue Moon,’ as it is called, is just one phase of a bold plan to establish large off-world settlements.”

And then comes the obvious literary-cultural reference: “It is a vision ripped directly from 20th-century science fiction.”

Can we dismiss it as space opera, though? A number of major figures, not least of whom is Elon Musk (whose Space X has often been mentioned here), are talking seriously about near-term orbital, lunar, and Martian habitation.

It is hard to wrap my head around an imminent private space colony project. It has always been something for the indefinite future, not something I expected to see. 

There remain scoffers, of course (and they may well be right), as well as more paranoid speculations — are the higher-ups, the most insidery of insiders, tipping their hand to a “breakaway civilization” event, perhaps to avoid worldwide catastrophe?

“People now have more information” than in the past, wrote Thomas M. Disch in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998), “and they are smarter, overall, as a consequence — even in those ways they choose to be dumb.”

I am keeping an open mind on whether Bezos’s proposed lunar colony is dumb or genius.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. The government is also jumping on board the Moon bandwagon, with the president floating a similar-to-Bezos schedule.

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Jeff Bezos, moon, luna, conspiracy,

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Ooga Booga Time

moon, earth, flag, Aldrin, Buz,z, tribe, tribalism, patriotism, globalism

Two tribes —

On the left, we see both iconoclasm (razing of Confederate memorial statuary) and a fixation on surface meaning (defending the actions of antifa by fixating on its name: “it just means ‘anti-fascism’!). 

On the right, rallying around the flag and MAGA hats has reached fever heat.

— Welcome to Ooga Booga Time.

In other words: tribalism.

Consider the upcoming movie about Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. The makers of this movie have made a point of not depicting the raising of the Stars and Stripes above the dust of Mare Tranquillitatis.

Why? Because, says the Canadian actor who plays the part of astronaut Armstrong, the filmmakers wished to present “Armstrong’s success as a ‘human achievement’ rather than a patriotic American victory.”

But it was, factually, very much a Cold War victory. 

What the filmmakers are doing is rewriting history to conform to their cosmopolitan, internationalist tribal mindset.* 

Nothing new, of course — Hollywood has been a propaganda mill for a very long time. Once it aligned itself with Washington, D.C. Not any more. 

Now, apparently, even depicting a central bit of traditional American symbolism in the history being filmed is so stylistically, ceremonially offensive that actors and directors and cinematographers avert . . . our eyes.

“One thing is needful,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “To add style to one’s character.” Maybe. But when it comes to politics what we need — in Hollywood and Washington and Anytown, USA — is less attention to symbolism. To style.

And more on substance. And truth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* And, perhaps, to appease the propaganda-minded censors of Chinese government. That’s Ben Shapiro’s take.

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Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Junk Sites or National Park?

A national park on the Moon seems like lunacy.

The news that Reps. Donna Edwards (D-MD) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) had introduced a bill, H.R. 2617, to create a National Historic Park at the Apollo landing sites immediately turned up on RedEye and similar sardonic news programs, no doubt, because the wording of the bill does not choose “Monument” but “Park.” And a park is something we drive to, park and visit.

At present, visiting the Moon isn’t a live option for anyone, much less a bookable destination for bus tourists, motorists, and motorcycle gangs.

And yet, let’s not roll on the floor, or even LOL: the bill’s fifth “whereas” has a point:

[A]s commercial enterprises and foreign nations acquire the ability to land on the Moon it is necessary to protect the Apollo lunar landing sites for posterity. . . .

A plausible case could be made for this, and congratulations to the legislators for thinking ahead!

But an even more common-sensible case could be made for the opposite policy, allowing private businesses to reclaim the sites for their own benefit, to promote more tourism. Let them preserve the historic sites on their nickel, rather than on the taxpayers’.

Besides, one could look at those landing sites as containing the detritus of previous holiday excursions. Whereas, (a) leaving litter behind on the beach doesn’t make the beach yours; or (b) discarding one’s car on the freeway for a week constitutes abandonment — just so, Apollo’s lunar sites and debris aren’t really U.S. government property any longer.

The abandoned artifacts are junk. Let them belong to the first enterprises that prove otherwise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Fly Him to the Moon

Some astronomers think of the Earth-Moon system as a “double planet,” our moon being so big and all. Undoubtedly, the Moon has been important for life on this planet, what with the amazing working of tidal effects — it may have even scooped up asteroids and other inter-planetary detritus, protecting our biosphere.

So “liking” the Moon, or wanting to know more about it, is not lunacy. (That “lunacy” derives from “Luna,” our natural satellite’s Latin name, is irrelevant. Really.) But sticking to the Bush-era “Constellation program,” a hopelessly expensive shoot-man-to-the-Moon-again project, long after it proved an idiotic waste of money, is lunatic. One of the great things about dropping the program has been witnessing Barack Obama talk up private enterprise in space. It’s always gratifying to hear the president speak something other than warmed-over socialism.

Enter Sen. Richard Shelby, of Alabama. He calls Obama’s plan to rely increasingly on private enterprise to send stuff into space “a welfare program for the commercial space industry.”

So, is this Republican stalwart thereby a strict free-marketeer, a laissez-faire “no subsidy” man?

No. His “Shelby provision” tacked onto an emergency military spending bill, last year, kept Constellation funding (but not the project itself) going to the tune of $1.4 million. Per day.

And it turns out that one of NASA’s main Constellation contractors hails from his home state, and contributes mightily to Shelby’s campaign coffers.

Worse than lunacy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.