NASA's turn toward endlessly puttering around in low Earth orbit since the heady days of the moonshots irritates the kid in me. (It was, of course, 40 years ago today that Neil Armstrong did his lunar tarantella.) In the late 70s, many of us were drawing up plans for condos on the slopes of Martian volcanoes and wondering whether, when the aliens came, they would arrive in small craft or more of a mothership affair.
I can't blame anyone on the extraterrestrial end of the flow chart for giving Earth a pass–we've mucked it up enough already–but what gives with NASA? Surely they could fund something more exciting. Because time is a-wasting, and we haven't even got our jet packs, let alone flying cars or even lunar timeshares, for heaven's sake. Get with the program, people.
And yes, we have to fund ever more expensive ways to kill each other, and there's plenty more to spend money on. But considering just how much we spend on waging war, couldn't we work in a billion now and again to save up for a trip out into the universe? Personally, I take great comfort in knowing there's a whole vast cosmos out there waiting, a million million places where the irrelevance of our petty squabbling is thoroughly clear.
Feel free to call me starry-eyed. There are worse things to be.
