TO THE MOON, GEORGE

For the low end imagination, interplanetary travel is the old 1950s B-movie scenario of putting four or five grunts and a girl with big tits in a can with fins and shooting them off to Mars, where they wander about in bubble helmets for a while, pick up a few rocks, and, if they aren’t killed by Martians, climb back in the can and blast off home, sometimes taking a lethal alien lifeform with them.

Since the current White House as never exhibited anything beyond the most unpleasantly mundane of low end imaginations, I suspect the GWB space program will amount to little more than grunts in a can, overlaid by a mind bogglingly massive federal-industrial superstructure of corporate fraud and corruption. Meanwhile the NASA shuttle fleet is grounded and two guys are sitting in a half built space-station that’s leaking air.

After George has made his space speech, I hope I’ll be commenting on it more eruditely elsewhere, but right, now, as the story unfolds, all I can do is whistle and mutter “damn.”

Damn, but I’d like to see humanity make it to the stars. Like Sun Ra said, “space is the place.”
But, damn, I don’t want to go there on any spaceship commanded by a member of the Bush family.

Open the pod bay door, please HAL.

Or, as Lt. Ellen Ripley once remarked. "Blast off and nuke 'em from orbit."