Where talk is cheap and vision true
Standing on the moon
But I would rather be with you
Somewhere in San Francisco
On a back porch in July
Just looking up to heaven
At this crescent in the sky”
("Standing On the Moon"
Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia
Copyright Ice Nine Publishing.)
Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia
Copyright Ice Nine Publishing.)
Lunar Colonies, Lunacy and Losses
By CHARLES M.
BLOW
Published: January 27, 2012
“Newt
Gingrich is spaced-out. Literally.
…Gingrich told a crowd on
Florida’s so-called Space Coast on Wednesday that “by the end of my second
term, we will have the first permanent base on the Moon. And it will be
American.” And he said that he would push for the introduction of a “Northwest
Ordinance for Space” so that when the number of colonists reached 13,000, they
could petition for statehood.”
While I grew up watching the Cold War’s Space Race take
place, and regret the loss of excitation about inter-planetary exploration that
is now the norm; Gingrich’s hollow proclamation is nothing but empty lies
offered for votes from another downsized technical industry seemingly abandoned
by the government and population.
This lie demonstrates a decided lack of historical
awareness as well as a horrific lack of technical and astrophysical education
on the part of the liar. The Space Race
with the Soviets was always a demonstration of military capability played out
against the peaceful vista of a cold, dead, rocky satellite. Every orbital flight demonstrated possessing
enough heavy-lift capacity to lob thermo-nuclear warheads. Every
survey mission dealt in some manner with surveillance of another
power. Every capsule, every command
module, every shuttle flight was highly experimental and carried the risk of
fiery death, explosive decompression, radiation storms, and countless other
hazards that cost the lives of pilots, flight crews, and even ground crews and
entire design and production teams. The
flights today still carry all those risks.
The goal of a moon base has been postulated by every
science fiction writer who has gazed skyward.
We’ve put men on the moon and outlasted the Soviets. Truthfully, given the state of
instrumentation today there is little we can gain from putting men on the moon
again that can’t be determined by miniature robots such as those that have
performed so remarkably on Mars.
Gingrich’s promise of a moon base demonstrates that he
has as little knowledge of what engineering and scientific challenges would
have to be overcome as he did of the combat in the VietNam war. He’s willing to take credit for the hard work
of others but like most of the GOP/teavanagelists of his era, don’t ask him to
take part in any of the scut work or endure any personal sacrifice.
The 51st state boast is clear evidence that
the “former speaker” would do everything possible to annex a global satellite
as an American territory. He, of course,
would have no historical clue about how the other industrialized/technical
nation would take offense at such action.
Nor would he care. He’d be quite
willing to start the first inter-planetary war, just as long as no one asked
him to give up anything.
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