An open letter to Tom Wolfe: Quit whining.
(This was originally written as a commentary on a friend's post, which is friends-locked. I have reprinted it here, with limited editing, to make it available for friends to read and comment on.)
I'm sensing a touch of bitterness on this subject (the lack of manned, American space missions). We went to the moon! C'mon, man, that was pretty cool. So, why is it that Americans feel like we were somehow entitled to more?
Tom Wolfe wrote an Op-Ed contribution in Saturday's New York Times in which he bemoans the lack of "philosophers" in NASA (the one exception he cites, of all people, is Werner von Braun). The essay's clear implication is that had we but had men of vision in NASA (and endless money, but Wolfe's generation never shied away from borrowing from future ones) we might not have Taco Bells at the foot of Mons Olympia by now, but we'd sure at least have our space cowboys out there, doing... well, something. That's not the important part. Making space safe for aging prose writers to retire to, perhaps.
Wolfe was a strong and clear voice for that most self-entitled of all American generations. If we wanted to go to the moon, to Mars, and beyond, then who the hell were these tiny, petty, unambitious men who would deny us this?
The reality is, of course, that Earth is far stickier than people would like, particularly baby boomers with their fading dreams of our manifest destiny in the stars. The safety issues involved in flying a manned Mars mission are staggering, let alone the logistics of a two to three year supply of food, water, fuel and spare parts. The idea that we can somehow rush the technology with the sheer power of positive thinking is spectacularly flawed (it is a telling thing that Wolfe was an outspoken supporter of George W. Bush's presidency).
The importance of manned missions seems to be central to the complaints of Wolfe and his crowd. "'Why not send robots?'" is a common refrain," he writes. He then answers this with a quote from Werner von Braun about the power of the human brain as being far greater and more efficient than a computer - a fair point when von Braun made the statement. In his day, the computer in the phone in your pocket would have filled a room, your laptop an office building.
Ah, but what of the lack of vision? The dream of accomplishment? Sadly, more bellyaching. We've built orbital probes that can peer into the sun, satellites that read the movements of the Earth's plates, and telescopes that peer to the edge of the universe. But Wolfe's ilk can't get past the fact that we don't have cowboys on Mars. Who exactly has the problem with lack of vision here?
One shouldn't infer from my saying this that I don't believe we'll ever make it off this rock; in the words of Burroughs, we're all here to go, and I do believe we will someday go into space. But in the meantime, I do feel that it would be wisest to start treating this planet as though we weren't going anywhere just yet.
I'm sensing a touch of bitterness on this subject (the lack of manned, American space missions). We went to the moon! C'mon, man, that was pretty cool. So, why is it that Americans feel like we were somehow entitled to more?
Tom Wolfe wrote an Op-Ed contribution in Saturday's New York Times in which he bemoans the lack of "philosophers" in NASA (the one exception he cites, of all people, is Werner von Braun). The essay's clear implication is that had we but had men of vision in NASA (and endless money, but Wolfe's generation never shied away from borrowing from future ones) we might not have Taco Bells at the foot of Mons Olympia by now, but we'd sure at least have our space cowboys out there, doing... well, something. That's not the important part. Making space safe for aging prose writers to retire to, perhaps.
Wolfe was a strong and clear voice for that most self-entitled of all American generations. If we wanted to go to the moon, to Mars, and beyond, then who the hell were these tiny, petty, unambitious men who would deny us this?
The reality is, of course, that Earth is far stickier than people would like, particularly baby boomers with their fading dreams of our manifest destiny in the stars. The safety issues involved in flying a manned Mars mission are staggering, let alone the logistics of a two to three year supply of food, water, fuel and spare parts. The idea that we can somehow rush the technology with the sheer power of positive thinking is spectacularly flawed (it is a telling thing that Wolfe was an outspoken supporter of George W. Bush's presidency).
The importance of manned missions seems to be central to the complaints of Wolfe and his crowd. "'Why not send robots?'" is a common refrain," he writes. He then answers this with a quote from Werner von Braun about the power of the human brain as being far greater and more efficient than a computer - a fair point when von Braun made the statement. In his day, the computer in the phone in your pocket would have filled a room, your laptop an office building.
Ah, but what of the lack of vision? The dream of accomplishment? Sadly, more bellyaching. We've built orbital probes that can peer into the sun, satellites that read the movements of the Earth's plates, and telescopes that peer to the edge of the universe. But Wolfe's ilk can't get past the fact that we don't have cowboys on Mars. Who exactly has the problem with lack of vision here?
One shouldn't infer from my saying this that I don't believe we'll ever make it off this rock; in the words of Burroughs, we're all here to go, and I do believe we will someday go into space. But in the meantime, I do feel that it would be wisest to start treating this planet as though we weren't going anywhere just yet.