Swiss Time Has Run Out

Did you hear about how the Geneva International Motor Show went this past March?  No?  That's because it didn't go at all.

It was canceled again?  Oh, no, it was held, all right.  

See how well-attended it was?

The truth of the matter is that the 2024 Geneva auto show was a bigger lemon than any of the Renaults shown in the picture above.  In May, its fate was sealed when the show's organizers announced that they were disbanding and that there would be no more auto shows in Geneva.  No one cares anymore.  Only a handful of major auto brands even participated in the show, and none of them offer cars for sale in the United States.    

All auto shows were in a degree of trouble by the end of the 2010s.  Then COVID hit in early 2020.  When the Geneva show was canceled that February, that's when I knew that this virus from China was serious.  The show was canceled for the next two years due to la pandémie de le covíde and in 2023 due to lingering COVID fears and "uncertainties in the global economy and geopolitics," though the organizers were happy to display cars in Doha, Qatar to appeal to crazy rich Arabs.  This year the show was finally held again in Geneva, but a funny thing happened in the five-year interregnum - people in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe decided to do something else with their time because they didn't really miss it.  

A lot of my own personal life was forever ruined by le covíde, and so were my plans for when I finally go to Europe - this show was on my bucket list.  But as I said before on an earlier post on this blog,  when would I ever find myself in Switzerland in March?  The organizers have since retrenched and regrouped to continue holding auto shows in Doha, but I have absolutely no plans to fly halfway around the world to a dry, sun-baked, oppressively hot city in the middle of the desert with horrible architecture when Las Vegas is so much closer.   

As for European car shows, there's always the biennial Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung in Munich (formerly held in Frankfurt), and the next one is in September 2025, but whether or not I make that depends whether we have a President who believes in freedom to travel wherever we want or a President who plans to turn America into a 3.8-million-square mile East Berlin. 

Hail Atlantis

The space shuttle Atlantis touched down from its - and the space shuttle program's - final flight early this morning, ending thirty years of use of NASA's fleet of reusable space vehicles in orbital flight. The shuttle, which seemed so cutting edge back in 1981 - back when personal computers were green-screen models and Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even a thought in his parents' minds - still was cutting edge, in a way, to the end. After all, the Soviet, and later post-Soviet Russian, space program has never quite had a spaceship of its own like the shuttles, and I don't think anyone failed to marvel at how versatile and practical they were.

The shuttle program had its bad moments, to be sure - the twin disasters of the Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 were the most obvious and the most horrible, and both could most likely have been prevented with more sound engineering and with better maintenance. Both explosions, in which fourteen astronauts lost their lives between them, caused launches of the other shuttles in the fleet to be postponed for over two years. (In what can only be described as a coincidence, both explosions took places in weeks beginning on Sunday, January 26.) But there were many notable moments in the launch of satellites, life science experiments that led to a greater understanding of the human body, and, of course, America's first woman in space, Sally Ride. Solar system exploration was a bittersweet experience; it was a Discovery mission that launched the Hubble space telescope in 1990, but then when the astronauts got back to Earth, it was discovered that a mirror had been ground to the wrong curvature and the telescope sent back blurry images. A servicing mission corrected the problem in 1993, and the images we've gotten of other solar systems from the Hubble telescope since then have been fantastic. But for the first three years, the Hubble telescope was the space equivalent of the Edsel.

The space shuttle program ended on a high note, servicing the international space station that promises greater space exploration to come. (Russian Soyuz spacecraft will service it - and include American astronauts - for the time being.) Complain about how the money could be better spent on earth if you want, but the space program has made possible from advanced medical imaging to global satellite positioning, so it's been a boon to our high-tech economy.

NASA won't have another new manned space vehicle for another three or four years. It's best to take the intervening time to figure out where we Americans want our space program to go from here.