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In 1969, I got about the best birthday present an American kid could get. American astronauts landed on the Moon. My father had taken me to see "2001: A Space Odyssey", and I knew America was taking the world to the Moon and beyond. Sure, Nixon was President, we were already mired up to the axles in Vietnam, the Cold War looked like the only way it would end would be by turning hot, but on the whole things were looking good.
They'd killed Kennedy, but his picture was hanging in shacks all over the Third World, often next to one of Che Guevara, and he'd gotten us to the Moon like he said he would. Sure, we were sucking up more than our share of the world's resources, wasting most of it, and supporting murderous dictators around the world, but we were going to give humanity the keys to the kingdom beyond the gravity-well. We were going to take the world on a ride to the stars. All would be forgiven.
Today it wasn't just bits of metal, ceramic tile, and bone that fell from the skies over Texas. It was the last tattered shreds of that dream, if there was anyone still dreaming it. America had been given the chance to carry not just ourselves but life itself to a limitless frontier of lifeless worlds, to start the Green Fire burning on lumps of dead, arid rock, to start the human race on a journey whose end could not even be imagined. If we'd done that, all the death-squads we trained and armed, every bomb we dropped, every weapon we built, every gallon of gas we wasted would have been forgiven, would have been justified as having been part of the mess which somehow got us all to the Moon and then Mars and then to the Stars.
But there's never going to be a Starship Enterprise or a Captain Kirk. English won't be the language of humans in space. Chinese maybe, if we don't manage to take the world with us as our fifteen minutes of strutting and fretting come to an end, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But not English. We had a chance that no other civilisation ever had, and we pissed it away. It's gone. The only place we can take the world now is down to Hell with us, as Dictator George War Bush and his handlers seem determined to do as they tell their idiotic tales.
We pissed it away on SUVs and trophy houses and other shiny toys, but mostly we pissed it away on weapons systems, long after there was no one left who could possibly even approach getting in the arms race with us. The last space shuttle we built, Endeavour, which was built to replace Challenger, cost about 2.1 billion dollars. That's what about ten of the F-22 fighters the military is buying itself will cost. The military needs them to replace the F-15 and F-16, already the best fighters in the world, I guess in case we go to war with ourself, since there's already no one else who could take us on.
We also pissed it away on aid to places like Israel, by far our top recipient, which is slated to get as it happens 2.1 billion dollars in military aid this year. We could have replaced Columbia, flying since 1981, the oldest shuttle in the fleet, with a new one instead, but I guess paying Ariel Sharon to shoot rock-throwing Arab kids was more important.
And now, in what may be the last flailings of a failing empire, we're being ordered by the oil companies and the Israelis to piss away whatever is left of any respect and affection there may still be in the rest of the world for America, and another hundred billion or so dollars (call it fifty new shuttles or so) that we don't have, by attacking Iraq. We're being ordered to expend fantastic amounts of ordnance to kill a bunch of Arabs who like a lot of other people have the misfortune to be ruled by a vicious despot with a taste for weaponry, a despot we used to arm and support. Unlike other misruled peoples, the Iraqis have the misfortune to be on Israel's hit-list, along with Syria and Iran, who we'll be sent after next, and somehow a whole bunch of our oil got under their sand, and they've got more water than anyone else in the Middle East, and that can't be theirs either, so we've got to go in and kill them. Bombing and starving isn't enough. We've been doing that for twelve years. We've got to shred whatever treaties and international laws we haven't already demolished and Attack! Attack! Attack!
I don't know what will come raining down from the skies if we do that. No one can really say what will happen then. But we're already hated, not just by Arabs but by lots of Europeans and Asians and Africans too. And we'll be hated a lot more if Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Feith and Perle and Blair and Sharon have their way.
And being hated is getting more dangerous every day.
Space Shuttle Endeavour, the replacement orbiter for Space Shuttle Challenger, cost approximately $2.1 billion. http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/ssa/docs/Space.Shuttle/general.shtml#one
The spaceship Columbia was the first Space Shuttle to fly into Earth orbit, in 1981. http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/sts-1/mission-sts-1.html
The F-22 Raptor, which the military is replacing the F-15 and F-16 with, costs about $100,000,000 to $400,000,000 each, depending on how you count it. http://www.counterpunch.org/f22.html http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/f-22-cost.htm
Assuming a $210 million price tag, the Columbia, the oldest shuttle, which has been in service since 1981, could have been replaced for about the price of ten F-22s.
Shuttle Crash & Smug NASA Managers "I F-ing Warned Them!" http://www.counterpunch.org/hardison02012003.html
Hey, guess what? The internal Nasa website linked to by the article above, which confirms she is for real, is suddenly unavailable! But there is a cached Google copy here at Google, and since there is no copyright in the Nasa HTML, I'm going to put a copy here for your viewing pleasure, in case the Google version gets lost.
Symbol and Synchronicity with the Columbia Disaster http://www.counterpunch.org/kroth02012003.html