McSpaceflight

I couldn't resist the cheesy term. Someone else has surely already used it. Mankind is still not at the point depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but we are inching forward. Space exploration is something that I get excited about. At the moment of this writing on a Wednesday afternoon in 2004, the Cassini-Huygens probe is mere hours away from entering orbit around Saturn. The Mars rovers are roving. Two men are orbiting overhead, getting ready to go for a spacewalk.

The last human to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan, got back into his spaceship and came home when I was two months old. During the intervening 31 years, mankind has not ventured out of orbit. We've talked a lot, and we've gotten some great pictures via unmanned probes, but we haven't really broken a barrier. True human exploration hasn't been going on; it's history rather than current events. This statement is perhaps untrue if one considers the recent privately funded suborbital flight of Mike Melvill.

Let me say that space exploration is vitally important. George W. Bush's corny, wooden oratory aside, exploration is part of human character. We are naturally curious. So why the hell are we still cowering here on the Earth? Simple:

1)We're too busy killing each other
People are killing each other all over the world, but the United States has no excuse for such behavior. The war in Iraq was declared for reasons that were false. Bush is a war criminal. What is this, the Crusades, for fuck's sake? Concentrate on our side of the planet, you asshole. Just look at all this hatred you've stirred up.
2)We're too busy buying shit we don't need
I see a lot of big, shiny cars with only one person in them. I see a lot of big houses. Christmas is a spending frenzy. Parents buy their kids new cars in exchange for good grades. If you've got the money, super. But why? Are you bored or something?
3)We're too cheap
Yes, space exploration is expensive. Everything costs money. NASA is the smallest agency in the federal government. The Cassini mission to Saturn cost about 3 billion dollars. The war in Iraq is somewhere around 120 billion. People say "Exploring space is stupid. We should be feeding the poor or something." Okay, feed them, dick. Food isn't as expensive as weaponry, and we'd save a lot of money on homeland defense if we didn't go to such extraordinary lengths to piss off everyone in the fucking world.
4)We're scared
Yes, manned space exploration is dangerous. So is crossing the street. So is breathing this polluted air. So is eating fast food. You do all those things. Considering the number of manned spaceflights and the number of days humans have spent in space, the track record is pretty good. If an astronaut dies on a mission, it's not because he or she didn't know the deal. You can safely sit on your ass and watch it on television.
5)We think too small
Exploration enlarges the world. It fills in blanks and corrects mistakes in our children's schoolbooks. It's something to be proud of. It's constructive.

Routine space travel is going to become a reality if it is profitable. The continent I am sitting on was discovered because of business ambition. The gadgetry inside your cellular phone is far beyond the computer technology that took men to the moon. You have it, cheap, because it was in big corporations' interest to make it happen. Deeper exploration takes longer to pay off, but what the hell? Five centuries on, we still talk about Columbus and Magellan. The trips they took could be undertaken now with a passport, a credit card, and a suitcase.