Earth to NASA

I was at the Getty Center in LA last weekend, the architecturally stunning museum complex high in the mountains overlooking the city. The friend I was there with noted that his mother, upon first viewing the expanse of galleries, gardens, and grandiosity, suggested the money should have been spent on the homeless. It’s hard to even offer a response to that level of reductive thinking. 

Until you read about the newest mishap with the Space Shuttle. In case you missed it, yet another liftoff debris encounter has punched a gash in the heat shields that is so severe that NASA fears it may burn up on reentry without a spacewalk repair, perhaps even with one.

The Space Shuttle seems to be the latest embodiment of American idiocy and impotence right now. Something so badly thought out that it can’t function without frequently grave consequences and waste of life and human energy. Something of so little apparent utility that we have no intention of designing new ones that work properly. Yet something we just won’t give up on.

I won’t go so far as to say the whole manned space program has been a giant waste, but I’m open to persuasion. And you do wonder, as with the Iraq war, what higher purpose could have been achieved with the billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and handful of lives that have been sacrificed for a program that devotes much of its in-flight time to assessing and repairing damage brought on by inherent design flaws.

Most of us pay so little attention to NASA and these “routine” flights that there is no public outrage or sense of national shame. Can our government and its retinue of outsourcing partners do anything right anymore? Or are we destined to pour billions and billions of dollars down various rat holes in the interest of satisfying the whims of politicians for whom there is no fact as compelling as the religion of manifest destiny?