WE RETURN TO SPACE
HO HUM

THE LATEST FROM THE SCEPTERED ISLE: No, nothing more on the elusive wannabe bombers, not yet anyway. But one new idea has come out of Her Majesty’s Education System which, it appears, is just as bad as ours. Brit Kids don’t have any more of a clue about who Winston Churchill was and who were their enemies and allies in WWII than American kids about who FDR (That’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt for you high school ‘social studies’ teachers) and our enemies and allies in the same conflict. By the way, The Brits and Americans were on the same side in that conflict in case you missed it.)

So from the land of Plum Pudding, Shakespeare, tea, Dickens, and the Beatles one prominent educator is proposing that schools substitute the term ‘DEFERRED SUCCESS’ for good old fashioned ‘FAILURE’, to avoid hurting the feelings of the little bastards who never open a book.

It will pass, of course, the modern incarnation of Parliament is a PC legislature run amok. Then this moronic idea will cross the great Atlantic and land upon our shores with a bang if it first hits the coast of Massachusetts or a whimper if it reaches Georgia’s Golden Isles.

How long would these people ‘delay success’? A year or two, a decade, a lifetime?

A SURVEY TAKEN IN LA BELLE FRANCE recently indicated that fully eighty per cent of all Frenchmen (and women, presumably) look into a mirror daily and like what they see.

There are some beautiful people in France, true. But if Jacques Chirac likes what he sees when gazing into a full-length inside the presidential palace, he’s either blind or more senile than his countrymen suspect.

THE UNITED STATES RETURNED TO SPACE TODAY:

Ho Hum!!!

I can’t get excited about it. Not at all. Of course

Of course I’m grateful that the crew is safe and that lift-off went off without an apparent hitch. Even watched five minutes of the launch.

But I don’t share the elation of some of our citizens with this ‘return’. It is not as if the current space program has any real focus.

We’re back in space!! So what? What next. Back to the moon? Hell we got there in 1969. Dropped by for a few visits. Left some junk on the surface and retreated to near orbit. President Kennedy promised that we would beat the Ruskies to the lunar surface. We did. They never got there. And the whole Apollo program just stopped. We never built on what we did.

So enter the Shuttle Program. Big cargo plane for putting mega payloads in orbit. Sounds like a winner for the Military Industrial guys. We can get our weapons way up there where they can threaten the entire world. Satellites. Lasers. Ray guns we peasants never even dream of, so fecund the scientific-military mind. Nukes. God we got the whole planet covered.

Now two shuttles imploded killing all aboard. Made us a little squeamish, I guess, afraid to be bold and forward.

And now we launch our secret weapons not from the shuttle, but under the power of their own rockets. We have enough top secret hardware up there to destroy all life on this planet for the next thirty-million years.

Not even the cockroach and the rat would survive if the order were given. God are we great!!!

So why the shuttle? Damned if I know. Folks!!

There was purpose to the early space program once we got over the fear of a Soviet Space Race. And, originally, there was purpose to the Shuttle. But why do we keep on doing it? No. Twenty-five years later? Over and over, boosting the damn things into orbit, space walking around, repairing a telescope or an obsolescent bit of military junk, sending back pictures of astronauts cavorting in a weightless playground? What’s the goddamn purpose?

“Space is way out there”. The wisdom of the early writers of space science fiction had us mastering first the moon, then the nearer planets, followed by the outer planets, and finally propelling man from the confines of his solar system. These steps are logical, consecutive, and rely on steady advances in technology.

My guess is that NASA has become a typical, governmental, bloated bureaucracy. Bureaucracies tend to lack vision. Bureaucracies like the status quo.

Which is why we continue to send astronauts into two week orbits around the home planet. The ‘international space station’. Yeah, there is somebody up there alright. Probably a couple of Russians and an American. And what are they doing? They probably play a lot of chess and watch internet porn.