Earth Attacks!

[Monte Davis]

> The December issue of the Utne Reader devotes its cover, 
> improbably enough, 
> to public and private spaceflight...

And a fine collection of knee-jerk cultural/political tropes about space it
is, every bit as blinkered in its way as the current PR boomlet for "New
Space" or "alt.space" (X-Prize, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, etc.) or as NASA's
hobbling march toward the Vison for Space Exploration.

I find myself chopping a narrow Visto in the space book I'm working on. On
one side are the True Believer enthusiasts, as convinced as they (or their
parents) were in the 1960s that the Breathless Breakthrough to a spacefaring
civilization is just around the corner. As I bought that dream rather
uncritically myself into my 20s, they now bring out the Sadder But Wiser
Space Realist in me: smell the coffee, folks, it's much harder -- and is
going to take a lot longer -- than people were thinking when they watched
Apollo and _2001_, whether pursued with public or private funds.

On the other side is the Boys and Their Toys crowd: space was never anything
other than a playground for the military-industrial complex's phallic
machines, we must heal the earth first, Bush is filling earth orbit with
weapons, outer space has been replaced by cyberspace, etc. (This includes
some GR readers who've never shaken off its eloquence about the V-2 and --
implicitly -- the morally lunatic ICBM race that followed, and take that for
the final word on rockets and space). They bring out the Sokal in me: with
only the most tenuous grasp of the real technology, politics, and economics
of space, they slot it into their ready-made cultural critique: Pokler=NASA,
technology=death, interest in space=indifference to humanity,
exploration=genocide & ecocide, etc.

The reality is a lot more complex, and a lot more interesting, than either
one.