Gimme a break (*rolls eyes to extreme ends of eye sockets*). I can’t believe how people can be so easily deceived and manipulated. This is a classic stunt of an amateur magician – misdirection. “Hey! Look over here! Check out what this hand is doing while the other hand robs you of all your civil rights. Look! Flashy space ships! Ooooo!!!!!! Wake up and look at the big fucking picture, people.
I want to know if the West will stand up and take responsibility for what's going on in the Middle East. Who will join Saddam when he's tried for crimes against humanity? Which multinational companies and which western politicians? Sometimes in politics the moral high ground can only be reached by wading through the lowlands of public amnesia.
A search of Australian Hansard for the period when Saddam was committing the worst of his crimes - gassing Iranian soldiers in 1983-4 and the Kurds of Halabja in 1988 - fails to turn up any expressions of concern in the Parliament by either John Howard or Alexander Downer. Not. A. Word. It's not until the WMD pretext falters in the weeks before the invasion that Canberra discovers human rights violations in Iraq.
Right up till the Gulf War he was the West's favored ally and trading partner, praised by George Bush Snr himself as “a source of moderation in the region”. At that time Washington was still providing Baghdad with dual-use licensed materials, including chemical precursors, biological warfare-related materials and missile guidance equipment - enabling Saddam to develop his WMD programs. It's difficult to believe that either George Bush 2 or over 150 companies in Europe, the United States and Japan which provided components and know-how needed by the monster in Baghdad to build atomic bombs, chemical and biological weapons, want this information publicly aired.
Now he says we want to go back to the moon (don’t give me any of that crap about faked moon landings or I will be forced to make you look silly). But I want to know what for? And why now?
The US no longer has the Saturn rockets that ferried the Apollo astronauts to the moon in the 1970s. And after more than 100 missions and plenty of kilometres, the Space Shuttle fleet is not up to the job. What's more, as Bush said yesterday, "America has not developed a new vehicle to advance human exploration in space in nearly a quarter century". Unless the US teams up with the Russians, who have such rockets, or the Chinese, whose time line has them on the moon by 2020, NASA will have to knuckle down and build a new spacecraft from, quite literally, the ground up. Are Americans ready to play nice in the sandpit?
NASA could join forces with the European Space Agency. The unmanned Smart-1 spacecraft, slated for launch next September, is a flight to the moon aimed at demonstrating Europe's space-faring capability. Once Smart-1 arrives, it will search for water or ice in craters and check out the mineral resources.
Of immediate interest to NASA, though, may well be the spacecraft's propulsion system. Fuelled by xenon gas and powered by solar energy, the so-called "ion engine" sidesteps the need to launch and carry heavy - and therefore expensive - conventional chemical rocket fuel. I mean, rockets????? What are we thinking???? We should be looking a nuclear power engines – its clean, cheap and safe. But the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty bans all testing to do with nukes. Bet they didn’t think that one through.
By the way, it's not surprising that, as an oil man himself, Bush mentioned several times the "abundant resources" to be had on the moon. Although I cant imagine what sort of practical application moon rocks might bring. His entrepreneurial background was also reflected in comments about "technological breakthroughs" from space activities. A White House fact sheet on the announcement claimed that more than 1300 NASA and other US space technologies "have contributed to US industry, improving our quality of life and helping save lives". On the list are kidney dialysis machines, medical scanners, programmable heart pacemakers and satellite communications. And Teflon. My eggs don’t stick to the pan thanks to NASA.
Don’t get me wrong. I doubt we'll forever stop sending humans into space. Human exploration of space is part of human nature. Going back to the moon and on to Mars and beyond is important for our souls. Of course, us earthlings cannot speak of space exploration first hand. Apollo mission astronaut Gene Cernan can. He was the last man on the moon. Yesterday, Bush quoted his remark on leaving the little silver globe: "We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind."
It's a beautiful and poetic thought. But, sadly for romantics, it wasn't the last one uttered from the moon. What did Cernan really say before lift-off? "Let's get this baby out of here!"
Posted on Jan 15, 2004, 4:08 PM from IP address 203.20.130.18