In my last post I noted a minor observation in the night sky:
“there it was… a gleaming silent line of human intelligence wrought among the stars. Maybe 50 dots in a perfect formation. A constellation. Just a hint of the 2,400 already up there and the vast grid that will be there in due time. It wasn’t sad, like a McDonalds billboard on the interstate, it was glorious, like a reminder that humans can fly if they wish.”
One of the most crushing things I’ve witnessed over my lifetime is the slow gradual embrace of what I call “socialist incapacity”. What I mean is that all people are born with endless potential but they’ve been worked over by powerful forces. They’ve been dumbed down, gaslit, and slowly badgered until they’re hollow and weak. They end up thinking of themselves as less than they once were. From hero to peasant. From peasant to supplicant. From supplicant to a means to an end. A cruel fate; to be a game piece on someone else’s chessboard.
I don’t like the degradation of humanity! Humans aren’t meant to be meat slabs in a vote farm. We’re individuals. We’re amazing! We’re not rabbits or buffalo, unaware animals grazing on what is there but not questioning how it got there. Such limited beings are incapable of deeper concepts like time or honor. Nor are we programmable robots; widget consuming production units… or increasingly often not even production units but votes to be purchased.
We are far more. We’re born with the spirit to soar and the intellect to accomplish that which we imagine. To a human, at least one that hasn’t been beaten into submission, the impossible is only that which hasn’t yet been done. This is why large systems dislike humans. Those who would oppress us sand “humans” and “citizens” down until they’re mere “civilians”, “constituents”, or even “clients”.
Our modern universities and declining social capacity are the smoldering ashes of the Library of Alexandria. It isn’t necessary that I know all these things, but it’s crucial that someone know all those things. Without them we are not mankind, but cavemen with iPhones. Yet former repositories of knowledge are subsumed in waves of foolishness.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Just as many as it takes to decide which restroom to use.
I see NASA as the saddest loss of all. NASA’s bureaucratic bumbling consumed most of my lifetime on earth. I was born to a time when “space hotel” was a legitimate concept. A child of the time had a reasonable shot at orbit. That was the trajectory that perished. What replaced it was a four decade committee meeting of the doomed. From this disastrous mess, humanity is just emerging.
Humans went from the Wright Flyer to Apollo 11 in 66 years. (1903 – 1969.) I was born just around when NASA lost heart. It spent a half century stepping on its own dick as I got old and stayed on the ground. NASA isn’t the cause of this. It’s only a reflection of humanity’s failures. We have a super computer in every person’s pocket but use it to spy on law abiding citizens. Who thought that was the best use of all that power and knowledge?
The news today is about airlift of baby formula from Germany. As if we were a people who can’t make baby formula. Of course we can make baby formula. We need only quit shooting ourselves in the foot and do the task.
We lack the progress of a serious people because we are unserious and unaccomplished. Oh sure, NASA did some neat things. They succeeded here and there. It seems sometimes almost by accident they’d cashed so many checks in so many congressional districts that it couldn’t help but make something useful. But overall they spent most of my life as a funds dispersal mechanism with a space hobby. If 66 years went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base I had a reasonable expectation of more in the nearly equal time that has elapsed. They can’t yet repeat what was last accomplished in 1972.
Why? Because NASA is a bureaucracy. Humans have the spirit that wants to go and the mind that makes it possible. Bureaucracies have the opposite, and they’ve the whip hand lately. Masked Karens and cell phone dopamine addicts can’t make the trip. But they can bitch about everything until nobody else has the heart to try.
However, all is not lost. Despair is a sin. It is betted to keep trying than whine like those who never tried.
Watch this:
It’s just a few minutes. What better thing are you doing?
You don’t have to geek out about nerdy tech terms. “Max Q at eleven seconds? Who gives a fuck?” Just bask in what is possible and how hard it was to accomplish. This is the real deal. Every single minute of that video is fraught with risk.
Unlike a society that’s cowering in the basement over COVID or inflation or Monkey Pox or someone who didn’t use the right pronoun, the people that made that rocket fly took on risk. They beat risk. They over came risk. They literally rise above the mundane.
In the video powerful machines are unleashing immense energy. All that massive effort is going through math and software and infinitely delicate machinery; converting thrust and vector to pinpoint accuracy. Smart people worked very hard on this. They lift humanity from the earth’s gravity well, position their machines precisely where they want them, and then direct them to fall back at screaming speeds to earth. At the last minute they pull their machines out of that swan dive to ground and land on a target. A tiny target floating in the ocean.
They do this over and over again. Falcon 9 has has 156 successful flights. What has any politician done to equal that?
SpaceX improves. It learns. SpaceX managed the first vertical landing of stage 1 rocket in 2015. This year they launched and recovered a stage 1 rocket that had been to space 12 times. Their satellite constellation is slowly providing internet service to the entirety of planet earth. I saw it in the skies the night of the lunar eclipse. Nothing said at a podium in DC matters as much as the small but perfect lights I saw in the sky.
Compare that to the bullshit you see in the “news”. Diesel is $6.50 and nobody knows how long truckers will keep delivering stuff. Speaking of stuff, much of it is floating in container ships in the pacific. Maybe farmers can keep producing food like we’re accustomed, or maybe they can’t. The president who got more votes than any other candidate in history took time off funding war in Ukraine to bitch out China about Taiwan. Nothing says “elder statesman” like less than a year between a botched evacuation of Afghanistan and a proxy war of choice against Russia followed maybe by a skirmish or two with China in China’s backyard. You’re free to disagree with me on all my implied opinions, that’s fine. The solution for these is as complex as the causes. But we can probably agree these aren’t good things. Sound, well reasoned people in systems of wise governance aren’t known for fuel shortages, declining food supplies, and war.
Yet through it all. Smart people who actually payed attention in college calculus class are doing what humans are meant to do. They’re launching spacecraft.
You can look up to the sky, or you can look at the shit on your shoes. Right now the shit is talking loudly, using words like disinformation, and spending money so much that the concept of money begins to diminish. It is the skies that show the dream. Idiots cannot reach the sky. Shit cannot build a rocket. Don’t let shit drag you down. In the end, it’s just shit.
Good luck y’all!
A.C.
P.S. Hat tip to Sondrakistan for reminding me how cool it is to be alive right now.
I am 57 years old.
When I was 3, I watched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins go to the moon.
Live.
On television.
In my living room.
With billions of my fellow human beings.
It is one of my earliest memories.
Each and EVERY time that I have watched a launch of ANY space vehicle since then, I have had the same reaction.
I weep.
This is not hyperbole. Tears down my face and racking sobs.
I weep tears of joy at liftoff.
Joy that WE have done it AGAIN.
We have fought and clawed our way into the sky and proved that we are NOT earthbound misfits, with no higher purpose than beasts in a field.
That we are capable of fantastic things and more than we can imagine.
Even our failures in this are the grandest achievements.
I weep tears of relief at each separation.
Relief that we will keep going. That there will be more. That we will take more steps.
Relief that, although I will never make the trip or close the distance, WE will.
…and then (as I’ve gotten older) I weep tears of heartbreak and loss.
Heartbreak that so many of us don’t care, or even acknowledge, our capabilities.
Our potential.
Loss in the lack of wonder and amazement in our attempts and successes that were shared by billions of us.
I have tried to explain my reaction to my wife and son and siblings over the years.
They are sympathetic, but they do not share my feelings.
Thank you, AC.
I now know that WE are not alone.
WE who see the glittering machines around our home world and stare in wonder.
WE who look upon the moon, not just as some distant satellite, but as a PLACE that WE have been.
A place that WE may go again, and BEYOND.
I will not live to see it.
That doesn’t matter.
…as long as WE continue, I am thrilled and content.
+1, AC. I have greatly enjoyed your latest posts. Very thought-provoking.
Ya know, speaking of looking up at the stars, I was doin’ just that a few nights ago.
Recently, I bought a cool PVS 14 white phosfor monacle. It operates by magnifying available light in the sky such as moon and stars.
On a fairly starry night, the naked eye sees some stars. With NVD’s, it’s multiplied by at least 1000.
One may see falling stars at a rate of one every few seconds if you’re looking in the right places. You may also, like I have, seen quite a few of the many satellites orbiting our planet.
All cool stuff. Like this post AC. just did.
Ohio Guy
I looked up, and saw the moon. And there was a guy walking on it. I was a kid at the time. It breaks my dropforged tiawanian excuse for a heart to think that we, mankind, just upped and gave up on so noble an endeavor. When I was in high school my GF and I contemplated sex in microgravity. Could have been neat, in a sloppy kinda fashion. Nerds, we thought it through. But she was beautiful. We could go to an L5 Motel! But NASA got hardwired into Boeing, and it all turned to shit.
I understand that there’s a Nipponese billionaire who is looking for a chick to fuck in orbit. He’s looking to drop about a billion dollars with a ‘B’. 50 years ago, we thought this might be a fine date for a 3-day weekend. Grab a shuttle, hang at the Hilton Station, fuck like bunnies in micrograv. No more expensive than a 5-day cruise to Bahama.
NASA fucked up the Shuttle from the word go. I followed every Shuttle launch and return. I remember Challenger and Discovery. (Wipes away manly tear.)
Elon seems to have the right idea. A re-useable spacecraft is the way to go. His cars suck, but it’s a concept. Consider this. You need a rocket. You have a choice between a one-off Boeing/NASA throwaway Kleenex rocket, and a sturdy re-useable Space-X launch vehicle, which has been proven in multiple uses. The NASA version has about a 15% failure rate, runs about 15 years behind schedule. and is 1500% over budget. OTOH, you have a cat who’s on a run to have a launch per week, no FedGov cash, has sent folks to and from the ISS, and is launching internet sats at a rate of like 50 per week.
Thank you AC & FishStyx – I share the same feelings as you.
I had the privilege of growing up and basking in Gemini & Apollo, building models and waiting and watching launches. I watched those first lunar steps and all the ones that followed it. Thought the Shuttle thing was a bit off but at least it was ‘Space’.
And then as an adult I’ve had the further privilege of actually being `one step away` from it all with a Father-in-Law that was with NASA before it was “NASA”. He belonged to a group of individuals that was spun-up (so to speak) to support WVB and the entire team. He worked with all the original team at Redstone/MSFC as it came into being. When he finally retired in ’83, he mainly did so because he had become, as he said, “a pencil pusher” with management overshadowing engineering.
At this point I can only hope that private entities continue to pursue space flight. NASA needs to step away and get back to its root as a research and develop organization. Do the science and produce the specs, then let the ‘builders’ do their thing. Doubt it will happen but I can hope.
I hope we can get our DNA off this planet but that window is closing rapidly. I expect I will see the end of space flight in my lifetime as we beat ourselves back down the ladder of technology.
But it has been glorious while it lasted and is amazing to watch every SpaceX booster nail an upright landing on a floating platform.
Maybe, just maybe it will work out ok…
I guess I can quote this depressing little aphorism here, recognizing that most readers will know the context:
“I am sorry, gentlemen, that I will be obliged to save your goddamn necks along with mine.”
– H. Rearden
He got over it, of course.
As a much younger man, I stood on the ramp at Edwards AFB and participated in Shuttle Recovery Operations. When that big beautiful bastardized broke wind and sound she was in a +- 60% ascent.
Flair over the desert, slickest touchdown imaginable. I’ve laid hands on that magnificent beast,?work the 747 piggy back ride.
I’m not a fan, but Elon Musk is a visionary. There’s few left
Yeah…I’m old enough to remember sputnik , apollo 11 . Remember kids my age sayin’ they cain’t walk on no moon … they are still saying that … others say the money should be spent on social programs … My vote goes to spaceX , Pat
As a kid, I was a space junkie and followed the space program from Mercury through Gemini and Apollo. I was in high school when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I remember the day after – the very day after – some fool penned a protest song about all the wasted money that could have gone into welfare programs.
The very next day! What a douchebag!
There are always shitheads who complain about someone else’s accomplishments. I’ve heard bitching about the “light pollution” of the pretty line of lights that was the Starlink constellation.
I also have heard the “don’t do this thing while people are poor and needy” argument against anything glorious and inspiring. Some folks can’t see the sky because they’re always looking at the dirt and whining.
I’ve been a Space Junkie since 1960, when I was 7. Watched satellites go overhead early in the morning on the paper route, built Estes rockets, played with Radio Control stuff, had fun with LDRS launches.
NASA screwed the pooch, becoming a bureaucracy with many appendages but NO brain… and no real impetus to go boldy where no man dared to go before. All they could do is spend money and later toe the Gubmint line with Diversity crap (and more).
Well, SpaceX has taken up the Torch, and will get to Mars in spite of the Gubmint. There’s a helluva lot of starry-eyed engineers and thinkers working for him, they are forward thinkers and now that they’ve cracked the reusability problem, it’s time to take the Heavy Lift capabilities of Starship and start throwing MAJOR habitats and other stuff into LEO and beyond!
Yes, SpaceX lives off of Government contracts, but I would rather see HIM get the money than ULA, Boeing, etc. because they are doddering fools that are sucking the NASA teat for all they can get. Have you compared the capabilities/costs of SLS compared to Starship? The ONLY reason SpaceX doesn’t have a monopoly on LEO launches is because the Gubmint/congresscritters insist on “spreading out” the “wealth” (contracts). Private Enterprise will ALWAYS outdo Gubmint hands down. Competition!