Friday, April 16, 2010
I Get Email ...
must’ve fallen from that light in the sky t’other night...
Tycho Ted here, writing from Luna City, located near Shackleton Crater. I live here in about 2110, and I’ve been reading a bunch of history books recently, Luna City, as you probably don’t know, since it ain’t happened yet, was founded by several private firms in 2020, primarily SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace. NASA first paid us a visit around 2025, having leased a ride from SpaceX. The concierge from Bigelow asked NASA to park around in the back, so as not to embarrass the paying customers—tourists.
I understand that back there in 2010 you’ve got a President named O’Bama. What, was he from Ireland, or something? He was black, wasn’t he? From Ireland?
But I digress. Back there in 2010, O’Bama actually did something that was incredibly important. (I just checked my history book. I got his name wrong; he wasn’t Irish at all, was he?)
President Obama opened up the Solar System. He’s the reason I was born here in Luna City, and why my daughter’s out there beyond what we call the “Continental Shelf” homesteading. That’s helping build an O’Neill colony out beyond the orbit of Pluto, in the Kuiper Belt. I just got some email from her, too; things are going fine. (No, we haven’t figured out how to send information faster than light; forget it, will ya? Slower than light’s the way the Universe is built.)
Obama didn’t mean to do all this. Not at all! From what I read in my history books, he was what you folks called a “stone-cold” socialist. ("Stone-cold," You don’t know what “stone-cold” is until you’ve ice mined at the bottom of Shackleton.) (Oh, by the way, why’d you folks elect him? After all of the evidence from the 20th Century that socialism doesn’t work, that it leads only to death and poverty, well, didn’t any of you pay any attention?)
I digress again. Sorry.
Well, socialism doesn’t work. That’s not a digression; that’s the central fact. The facts are clear from history. Socialism didn’t work in Russia, it didn’t work in China, it didn’t work in Vietnam, it didn’t work in China—and it didn’t work for NASA either.
What? Did I say something that offended you? That somehow surprised you? Of course NASA was nothing but a socialist enterprise. Look up the definition of what “socialism” is and then give a look at what the histories say about what NASA did from about 1970 until about 2010, when Obama changed things.
Obama eliminated a program within NASA that was supposed to take specially selected government employees—the only ones allowed to go into space by the American government before the skies were opened up to everyone by private enterprise (I think they were called “astronauts")—that was impossible to pay for. Even a blue ribbon committee appointed by President Obama in 2009 stated that even if the Ares I rocket and its Orion crew capsule were to show up entirely developed for free, that NASA would have to immediately cancel the program, because it couldn’t afford to operate it.
You could look it up. It’s true!
And furthermore, the Aries I rocket was incredibly badly engineered. It wouldn’t have worked; it was a deathtrap. By the time President Obama canceled it, NASA wasn’t capable of safely engineering any rocket.
Now Obama didn’t do this because he was a fan of capitalism, like us here in Luna City. No, he was a socialist to the core, and several of the tenets of socialism are that humans are bad, that technology is bad, that exploration is bad, and most certainly, that expansion and growth are bad. From what I have read about the rest of this one-term president, he believed all of those tenets with his very soul (if he had one). No, what he thought he was doing was shutting down having any Americans going into space, even if they were specially-selected members of the Aerospace Nomenkultura, them there “astronauts.” This was a view that his cronies in the Democrat Party almost entirely shared, too. Look at what President of the Proletariat Pelosi (isn’t that what you folks called her?) thought about spaceflight with humans—or technology of any sort—throughout her career. Is it any surprise that Obama promulgated a policy that his minions in Congress wanted? (Or was he the minion of the Democrats in Congress? The histories aren’t clear on this to me.)
These dummies didn’t believe in private enterprise. Business was Bad, wasn’t it? Private enterprise was evial, wasn’t it? These idiots thought that by getting the socialist enterprise called “NASA” out of the way, that private enterprise, which they didn’t believe in, couldn’t do the job of opening things up in space. This would serve their purpose: to shut down American human spaceflight.
You folks in 2010, you’ve got to help me out here; you’ve got to explain some things to me that I don’t understand when I read my histories. The Republicans, who as I understand things, were supposed to be the champions of free enterprise and the very enemies of socialism, were the most staunch opponents of Obama’s space plan. Why did they support continuing a socialist space program? Were they so in love with the pork that came into their districts—some of them—from the government tax redistributions caused by NASA—that they not only abandoned their principles, they not only turned their back on them, but strongly fought to continue what had for 40 years been an expensive and obvious failure? I don’t get it. Perhaps you can explain it for me?
Well, in any case, thank Klono’s Claws that Obama’s plan was actually carried out. In shutting down NASA’s 2004 plan to go back to the Moon, by canceling it, Obama utterly and completely inadvertently opened up the rest of the Solar System, unleashing the forces of private enterprise and allowing humanity to expand outward into the Up and Out, where energy and mass are plentiful and where doomsday has been canceled. At the time it seemed like the end of the world to some. And to some it was—the socialist parasites of the American Nomenkultura. But to the real space pioneers, like Buzz Aldrin (but not Neil Armstrong) and Elon Musk, Jeff Greason and Pat Bahn, it was the beginning of the beginning they’d worked for their entire lives.
And now I gotta go read what my daughter’s up to. Hey, they’re talking about building a worldship for an interstellar voyage! Those crazy kidz! Now, why would anyone want to do that?!
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