After listening to President Obama’s most recent State of the (Dis) Union speech last Tuesday night, I couldn’t help thinking, I’d sure like to be Scott Kelly.
Just to remind you (since none of the TV commentators bothered to point this out), Kelly has been picked to become the first U.S. astronaut from NASA to spend a year in space – possibly a prep for a future voyage to Mars.
Remember NASA? That’s the National Aeronautics Space Administration, although you wouldn’t know that from a quick perusal of the NASA website. But I don’t blame them. Our space agency has lost much of its hype since our government forced it to reinvent itself after discontinuing funding of human flights beyond our atmosphere, although that could change soon.
But I digress.
Kelly will be blasting off in March, appropriately enough, the month we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, and for our man in space, it will be the very tip “top of the morning” when he goes on his way.
Ironically, as noted by the website space.com, Kelly “is scheduled to launch on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station” where “he and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will live and work on the orbiting outpost for one year.”
I wonder what Comrade Putin has to say about this. I certainly hope the leader of all the Russias (including Crimea) was at least consulted. Given the Kremlin’s expansionist policy, let’s hope that Putin doesn’t extend the Russian empire’s grasp to holding the Space Station – and the American within – hostage. Remember, the U.S. government’s policy is no ransom payments.
Despite the potential risk, I’d still trade places with Kelly because he’s in the forefront of what the President characterized in his address as being in a “race for the kind of discoveries that unleash new jobs … pushing out into the Solar System not just to visit, but to stay (my emphasis).”
This means colonization, folks. No question about it.
Obama and his advisers are firm believers in global climate change and they know that the timeline for Planet Earth is rapidly winding down, thanks to out-of-control development, coupled with overpopulation and the widening of income inequality.
That’s why Obama is subtly reversing course – abandoning all pretense of developing a domestic policy once aimed at eradicating poverty and enhancing our quality of life – and turning now toward conquering the Final Frontier … Space.
Mars is now our Destination of Choice and I want to be part of the vanguard that will, undoubtedly, be re-shaping the Red Planet as our new home. I don’t know if I’ve got The Right Stuff to make it there but maybe, at the very least, I can become the First Journalist in Space.
Forget about “middle class economics” – how does not charging for community college do anything really to change the high dropout rate? The whole thing is just a smokescreen for the President’s real intent: to create the Great Space Society.
After all, you didn’t hear any mention of gun control, did you? Nothing about immigration reform or the willful emasculation of Frank-Dodd by bank lobbyists. He’s caved on everything – all the remedies for fixing the ills here on this planet.
I’m sure that the Koch brothers, Dick Cheney, Jamie Diamon and probably even Bill Clinton, have their reservations already secured for that expedition to Mars.
But, despite everything, I believe Bill and Melinda Gates will still be down here, giving it their all for this world.
Which, I suppose, is where all of us should be engaged, after all.
— Ron Leir
