All Spaced Out

In my blog post on Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos from this past January, I wrote that Bezos has capitulated to Trump to prevent Trump from getting postal rates on packages raised, which would be a detriment to Amazon.  I had completely forgotten that, while Musk has own own outer-space pursuits and has contracts with the government in relation to that endeavor, so does Jeff Bezos.  I forgot about Bezos' own space-exploration company, Blue Origin.  

Of course,  Bezos wants to keep his government contracts for his space-exploration endeavors as well, in this time where even the exploration of space and the expansion of human knowledge of space have been privatized, so of course that ties in with capitulating to Trump.  Bezos wants to be a player in this lucrative and relatively new business as much as Musk does.  And in order to promote his own interests, Bezos has to pull an egregiously dumb publicity stunt involving an all-female "space" crew to promote the role of women in space exploration even as Trump is purging references to female astronauts and going after programs in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) designed to foster female astronauts in an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

Here's what went down - or, should I say, up.  Bezos selected a six-woman crew to fly into the outer atmosphere of the earth for roughly ten minutes in a capsule and then come back down.  The "flight" was yesterday.  The women on board included only one real astronaut - Aisha Bowe, a former aerospace engineer for NASA.  The other crew members included, among others, TV newswoman Gayle King and former TV entertainment reporter Lauren Sánchez, who is better known these days as Jeff Bezos' fiancée.

Oh, and pop singer Katy Perry.

WHAT?????????????????????  

Katy Perry is no one's idea of a great singer.  She's a lightweight performer who's known for cottony songs and a superficial image.  Her career owes her existence to the influence of a certain single-named dance diva from Michigan who did more damage to popular music than cocaine.  Perry is, in a word, an airhead.  And her utter cluelessness in describing her "mission"  was obvious.

"It's about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging," said Perry, who somehow failed to bring up Trump's attack on women in NASA. "And it's about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it . . ..  This is all for the benefit of Earth."

And just how is this more significant than Sally Ride becoming in 1983 the first American woman in space, who has been followed by dozens of American female astronauts?

"Space is going to finally be glam," added Perry, who, along with her traveling companions, discussed having their hair and makeup done for the "flight" with that noted science and aviation magazine, Elle. "If I could take glam up with me," Perry added, "I would do that. We are going to put the 'ass' in astronaut."

She's already done that on her own.

And to think Hillary Clinton made her a leading surrogate for her 2016 presidential campaign.  No wonder she lost.

This wasn't a scientific mission to see how women could fare in space or anything like that.  This was a publicity stunt for Bezos, for Sánchez, and for Gayle King,  whose participation in the stunt was covered by her employer, CBS.  King violated the cardinal rule of journalism.  She went beyond covering the story to being the story.  

But then, given that she moonlighted for CNN by hosting a talk show with Charles Barkley that was meant to be "centered around the news stories and cultural moments that Gayle and Charles are most interested in," that was likely to be expected.

Bezos remains the main villain in this sorry escapade of ego and superficiality in what was clearly a "news" story meant to be entertainment.  But Perry,  Sánchez and King shouldn't get off scot-free for allowing the trivialization of women in space.  As Maggie Harrison Dupré wrote in Futurism, there was "an insidious hollowness to the sweeping characterization of the flight as a great achievement for women that's somehow paving roads for aspiring future space travelers . . . that's deeply, and cynically, at odds with the way that new federal mandates about diversity policies are actively working to erase women's legacy in American space exploration."

I once foolishly included Katy Perry on my soon-to-be-terminated blog "Pictures of Beautiful Women" (POBW), back when I wasn't aware of what a joke she was, but I took her down a couple of weeks ago, as I no longer wanted her included on my blog in its final weeks of operation (I'm shutting it down on May 31).  But I also added Gayle King to my blog.  I now have to remove her as well.

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.

Fantastic Voyage

President Obama released a revised plan for the United States space program that has space exploration advocates evenly divided over the issue. Obama has canceled the Constellation program meant to develop space vehicles to return astronauts to the moon, and he's revived the Orion program originally meant to supplement the Constellation program but downsized it to create rescue craft for astronauts trapped on the International Space Station. How will anyone get to the space station in the first place? By hitching a ride with the Russians on their Soyuz spacecraft.

Instead, Obama wants to develop new spacecraft designed to go to Mars and beyond - possibly moons of other planets, asteroids - and he wants to land on Mars by 2025. The moon is redundant in Obama's vision - we've been there before, why go again? A public-private partnership will develop commercial spacecraft to transport astronauts to the space station - which will have its life extended by about five years - to eventually replace reliance on hitching a ride with the Russians.

Many complain about the lack of a U.S. presence in space for an indefinite period while the Chinese are starting their own moon mission program, and lawmakers in Florida and Texas balk at the idea of so many NASA jobs possibly being cut. Others counter by citing the jobs that will be created by Obama's long-term strategy, and still other proponents of his plan cite the entrepreneurial opportunities for private interests - though, since NASA works in the name of science and the public good, such a perspective seems rather dubious. So what do the original moon men, the Apollo 11 crew, think of all this? Neil Armstrong is against it; Buzz Aldrin is for it. I don't know what Michael Collins, the only Apollo 11 crewman who remained in the space capsule and thus did not walk on the moon, thinks.

But here's what I think. Although Obama says the space travel is not a luxury, I would like to point out that international travel - especially for those of us who've never been abroad except for a couple of trips to Canada - is a luxury most of us can't afford while we're in a recession. It so follows that, in this recession, the government should be paying more attention to problems here on earth, and not worry about getting to Mars so much. We can try for that eventually, but in the meantime, we should try to make it possible to transport people in high-speed trains on earth, not send high-speed spaceships to another planet. Besides, the only difference between Mars and the moon is that Mars is red. If there were life on that planet, the unmanned Viking spacecraft would have found it in the seventies. Which leads to the obvious point - we find out a lot about space with such unmanned projects, so why do any of us have to go up there and find it out in person? What's left to develop from the space program for civilian use, anyway? We have the Internet, and how much Tang can we possibly drink?

And please, keep private money out of it. Private money corrupts the public interest.

Let China go to the moon. They're only going to copy our achievement and it will seem unremarkable when it finally happens.

Just like the first American high-speed passenger rail line.