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Quick blopic: the American space program is not, and is not intended to be, an American space presence.
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That’s it.

That’s enough spaceflight retrospectives for me. No more film-grainy beauty shots of Saturn Vs riding that drawn-out columnar cataclysm out of the atmosphere we’re all born in. No more narration of milestones met before my time, or of the names of the men who risked life and career to achieve them.

The feeling is the kind of indignation felt by a con-man’s mark. You know, that special tang of outraged complicity.

What a hick is the Mad Farmer!

…I’m going to try to keep this as non-advocative as possible. Some of you will doubtless not agree that the U.S. should put people in outer space, and I’m not here to change your minds if you feel that way. Please read on anyway, be my guest; but for everyone else, this is an open letter to you.

So the President wants us to establish a moon base, and possibly move beyond that to Mars.

How the Hell was it left to a *second* President to affirm a moon landing?

I think the answer is: because he’s merely a President. And we who perceive a human legacy in outer space, failed to lead the way there. And so we left it up to Bush to make the call.

We, the ones who buy into the vision and the promise. We blew it. We have not, to this day, made the right promises to the right people.

We left it up to a politician to test the air, to judge the time right. Who knows; maybe he shares the vision. Doesn’t matter.

I’m not angry at the President. I’m furious that the most organized constituency backing yesterday’s declaration is precisely the coterie in whom a mandate to resume space exploration *should not* be assigned. In fact, they shouldn’t be allowed beyond the visitor’s stands of our country’s spaceports: the upper management of NASA.

Who’s in charge of this residue of the Cold War? This odd Executive Department toe, and its pathetic hold in the outer dark?

They are who we left them to become.

A bunch of self-serving bureaucrats who cannot imagine a significant space initiative without assigning a ridiculously huge budget projection to it.

A budget that is astronomical only because it is proportionate to their cynical incredulity.

Come on! You can’t tell me that men and women who really crave accomplishment, would stomach a management career at an agency only too happy to keep an elephantine, Rube Goldberg space launch system like the Shuttle and its self-serving contractors wheezing along.

And the thing that’s hardest to bear is that I brought into it. I thought that the space program could be fixed. Improved, rationalized, so it could lead beyond an American Space Program. Into an American Space Presence.

I and a lot of people besides, many of whom carry the water and do the work at NASA and at other agencies. The ones who hold the purse strings, don’t agree. They don’t get the vision, and they wouldn’t want to risk anything to achieve it if they did.

They don’t share our vision.

No, we’re finally heading back, but for the same damn kind of impulse as drove us in the first place. This time it’s because of the Chinese, who, bless their nationalist hearts, orbited Lieutenant Colonel Yang Liwei last year. The same month NASA allowed as we *might* get back into space as early as Sept. 2004.

If it was so damn freaking important to be preeminent in space, why the hell did we wait around for thirty years?

It’s likely too late for American hegemony in the Solar System. With the right space drive, we could have had people orbiting Jupiter in 1975. No joke, read “Project Orion” by George Dyson.

Hydrogen cracking stations on Enceladus. A week’s ticket to Zero Park in Earth orbit. Blackened catfish at an end-of-shift party at a lunar smelter; invitations to a baby shower in the L5 habitat the week after.

So much freaking solar power you could pay the Saudis to keep their oil in reserve. Because they sure as heck wouldn’t undercut satellite-generated electricity on price!

An American Space Presence is a matter of national destiny. It is up to us… and our political will as space advocates… to decide if we want to be there as a country. We’ll choose to do that, or we will not.

But don’t get taken. This Presidential initiative may be as practical as it sounds, and it does have a logical progression of goals, but it’s just a flagship of national competition.

Maybe we who want to forge a national destiny in space can even use elements of this initiative.

But we have no excuse now. We need to perceive the *real* reasons why bureaucrats and lawmakers make soothing noises at us.

We can’t appeal to them anymore.

We must hold the money, and withhold the votes, and make the promises to interest groups that only space development can keep - if we’re going to see the job done.

15 January 2004