Whenever I think of all the stuff we might spend money on, you know, to make everyone on earth happy and content, I think of outer space. Whenever I think, “Where are we gonna get enough money to be able to buy every homeless person a new house?”, I think of outer space. When I ponder society’s problems, when I think of investing a few bucks to buy participation trophies for all the Millennials who have stopped going to work so that they’ll maybe have an ounce of pride and self-esteem, yep, I think of space. If I hear the phrase “federal budget cuts” or “reduced spending plans” or “I sure could use a few extra bucks” I think of NASA and all the money lost in space – never has so much dough been spent with so little return.
Did you know that the famous 1969 moon landing was actually filmed in a North American Rockwell warehouse on Imperial Highway in Downey, California (“one small step for man, one giant dupe of mankind”)? That’s just part of the shell game we call the US space program. Rocket ships, space stations, shuttles, moon shots, Mars probes, dead space chimps – your tax dollars funded all of it, and all you really got is a few fuckin’ space rocks.
Since 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has spent almost one trillion inflation-adjusted dollars (and that’s only through the year 2018). We spent more than $200 billion on the space shuttle and another $50 billion on the International Space Station. You know what the International Space Station is? It’s a place where foreigners can go to drink Tang.
Did you see that we flew a drone around Mars? Yep, it took a picture of some rocks and big mounds of dirt. Your government spent billions of dollars on that, Shit, we have an entire state filled with rocks and big mounds of dirt, we call it Arizona, and I would have driven out there and snapped a few pictures for nothin’ but gas money.
As you may know, this whole exploring space crap started as a public relations stunt. In the late 1950s and early ’60s Russia launched their little satellite Sputnik and everyone’s hair caught on fire. The Kennedy administration and almost everyone in government had zero confidence that space exploration had any true scientific value, but to prove that democracy was just as good as communism (and to generate some favorable PR at the height of the Cold War) they decided to make a relatively small investment and orbit the earth a few times.
That’s where it should have ended, but now, a trillion dollars later it’s turned into a federal money grab we can’t fuckin’ stop.
Now I get that a bunch of propeller heads get off on exploring their surroundings. I also get that these nerds somehow found breeding partners and now have offspring that need to go to space camp. So here’s what I’ll do. NASA can continue to exist but ONLY to conduct space camps for future social misfits. I’m willing to set aside a budget, say $5 million, for that. We keep the remaining trillion dollars for a rainy day and stipulate that all future investment in space travel and space stations and little pills that have all the calories and tastes of a steak dinner, must come from the private sector.
Let the electric car/Star Trek crowd find the next fuckin’ frontier.
Photo credit: jaci XIII on VisualHunt.com
