The Dark Side Of 9-11

50 years ago the Space Age began.

12 years after Sputnik I's alarming debut, I photographed the roaring launch of Apollo 11 for this  Conde' Nast cover.  I've been in volcanic eruptions before and since, but the 1969 event was like nothing so much as 9-11 run backwards.

Only louder.

The political dark side of NASA's thundering  technological  triumph has parallels in the aftermath of 9-11 as well . The focused idealism seen in the months following each event  gave way to both millenarian dreams and dystopic fantasies, and a plenum of unjustified claims.

In the moon launch's case, the success of outspending our Cold War adversary led to NASA's evolution into an obstacle to economic sanity in space , as its vastly expensive bureaucracy turned to defending its turf instead of expanding man's presence in  the solar system.

In the 1950s many science fiction writers predicted  men would walk on the moon, and though few were so bold as to assert it would happen within a decade, many  of the greatest  gathered at Cape Kennedy  to witness the realization of their dream. They did a lot of predicting, but none  imagined that after a half dozen lunar voyages in as many years , no one would set foot on the moon for another generation. It was a suggestion as  inconceivable as Columbus returning from the New World only to counsel  Queen Isabella to stop wasting  her time and treasure on  Atlantic caravels , and focus on employing more galley slaves.

That is essentially what we got five centuries later, as NASA's dysfunctional bureaucracy concentrated on the ill fated Space Shuttle even as an explosion of entrepreneurial creativity  in Silicon Valley showed that the Right Stuff had quit Cape Canaveral and gone west.

Within five years of  9-11, TSA had likewise discovered that the main mission of any organization that does not have to justify its mandate is to spend  as much as possible, but while NASA merely wasted the taxpayer's money, mindless spending by Homeland Security translates into the waste of the nation's time as well.  Treating passengers like Spam In A Can astronauts  prepared to suffer unending delays to get off the ground manifests bureaucratic sadism  more than safety concern.

NASA 's downward trajectory can teach us a lot about what else TSA should not be doing, but if history is any precedent, the last thing Homeland Security  will do is study those lessons of its own accord.

Comments

[DensityDuck]

Oh, for God's sake. Yet another article moaning about NASA focusing on the Space Shuttle.

People, let's learn some history, here. NASA didn't want the Shuttle. They didn't need the Shuttle. They didn't have any use for the Shuttle. But for NASA to exist as an organization, they needed government money; and Congress had lost interest in space about thirty seconds after we beat those Russkies to the Moon. NASA had to turn to the military, and the military had its own priorities; the only service that had any interest in space was the Air Force, and they only thing they cared about was spy satellites. So we got a Space Shuttle that was a perfect vehicle for launching spy satellites, and it was damn near useless for anything else. But it would have been a terrible provocation to have the Air Force develop its own satellite launcher; so everyone pretended that it was a NASA vehicle, and painted giant NASA signs on the side of it, and just sort of didn't talk about what it was really _for_.

NASA would have preferred to keep going with Skylab and other such missions, but they were dependent on the Air Force for money, and the Air Force didn't care about any of that silly science shite. We're DEFENDING THE FREE WORLD, here, egghead, so you just sit back down and maybe if we're feeling magnanimous we'll give you the ICD for the cargo bay so you can make a science-instrument pallet that's exactly the same size as a spy satellite.

[gabriel christou]

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