Moon Shot

Via Sadly, No! we learn Chuck Krauthammer wants Obama to spend money we don't have to go to the moon so we can claim all the good spots for building moonbases for our big moon lasers for totally showing space just who is the goddamn boss around here.

America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll be totally grounded. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

So what, you say? Don't we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we'd waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we'd still be living in caves.

Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one's asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington -- "stimulus" monies that, unlike Eisenhower's interstate highway system or Kennedy's Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness -- to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

And while I agree that we do need a space program, let's be intellectually honest about the whole "America's military dominion over space" thing here, Chuck. Honesty is lot better than this blather:

Why do it? It's not for practicality. We didn't go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

The greatest example? Who could have predicted that the moon voyages would create the most potent impetus to -- and symbol of -- environmental consciousness here on Earth: Earthrise, the now iconic Blue Planet photograph brought back by Apollo 8?

Please. Just admit you want to leverage the moon's military applications towards kicking China's and Russia's ass, just like everything else the neocons want to leverage all our resources towards, and be done with it. That's what this is really all about, Fricking Huge Moon Lasers manned by WOLVEREEEEEEENS.

Sheesh.